Team finds earliest evidence of large-scale human-produced air pollution in South America
Team finds earliest evidence of large-scale human-produced air pollution in South America
Feb 09, 2015 by Pam Frost Gorder
[font size=1]
North dome of the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru in 2003. Researchers at The Ohio State University
found evidence of human-produced air pollution within the ice that predates the industrial
revolution by more than 200 years. Credit: Paolo Gabrielli, The Ohio State University.
[/font]
In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia—then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history.
Winds carried some of that pollution 500 miles northwest into Peru, where tiny remnants of it settled on the Quelccaya Ice Cap.
There it stayed—buried under hundreds of years of snow and ice—until researchers from The Ohio State University found it in 2003.
In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report discovery of a layer within a Quelccaya ice core that dates to the Spanish conquest of the Inca, contains bits of lead and bears the chemical signature of the silver mines of Potosí.
The core provides the first detailed record of widespread human-produced air pollution in South America from before the industrial revolution, and makes Quelccaya one of only a few select sites on the planet where the pre-industrial human impact on air quality can be studied today.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-team-earliest-evidence-large-scale-human-produced.html#jCp
