EGU25-9890, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-9890
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Oral | Friday, 02 May, 14:10–14:20 (CEST)
 
Room N1
Role of the stratosphere in the global mercury cycle 
Alfonso Saiz-Lopez1, Carlos A. Cuevas1, A. Ulises Acuña1, Juan A. Añel1,2, Anoop S. Mahajan3, Laura de la Torre2, Jeroen E. Sonke4, Aryeh Feinberg1,5, Juan Carlos Gomez Martin6, Julian Villamayor1, Oleg Travnikov7, Feiyue Wang8, Johannes Bieser9, Joseph S. Francisco10, John M. C. Plane11, and the Et. al*
Alfonso Saiz-Lopez et al.
  • 1Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Institute of Physical Chemistry Blas Cabrera, Madrid, Spain (a.saiz@csic.es)
  • 2Environmental Physics Laboratory (EPhysLab), Centro de Investigación Mariña (CIM-UVIGO), Universidade de Vigo, 32004 Ourense, Spain.
  • 3Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Pune, 411008, India.
  • 4Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, CNRS/OMP/Université de Toulouse, 31400 Toulouse, France.
  • 5Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
  • 6Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC, 18008, Granada, Spain.
  • 7Department of Environmental Sciences, Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova cesta 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
  • 8Centre for Earth Observation Science, and Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada.
  • 9Helmholtz-Zentrum Geethacht, Institute of Coastal Research, Max-Planck-Strasse 1, 21502 Geesthacht, Germany.
  • 10Department of Earth and Environmental Science and Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
  • 11School of Chemistry, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

Mercury (Hg) is a global pollutant with substantial risks to human and ecosystem health. By upward transport in tropical regions, mercury enters into the stratosphere, but the contribution of the stratosphere to global mercury dispersion and deposition remains unknown. Here, we find that between 5% and 50% (passing through the 400K adiabatic layer and tropopause, respectively) of the mercury mass deposited on Earth's surface is chemically processed in the lower stratosphere. Our results show the stratosphere as a unique chemical environment where elemental mercury is efficiently converted to long-lived oxidised species. Subsequent downward transport contributes substantially to the oxidised mercury burden in the troposphere. The results show that the stratosphere facilitates the global dispersion of large amounts of mercury from polluted source regions to Earth's remote environments. We find that stratospheric transport is as important as tropospheric transport in interhemispheric mercury dispersion. Future projections suggest that expected changes in atmospheric circulation will increase the transport of mercury into the stratosphere.

 

Et. al:

Wuhu Feng, Juan Z. Dávalos, Daniel Roca-Sanjuán, Douglas E. Kinnison, Javier Carmona-García, Rafael P. Fernandez, Qinyi Li, Peng Zhang, Yanxu Zhang, Christopher S. Blaszczak-Boxe.

How to cite: Saiz-Lopez, A., Cuevas, C. A., Acuña, A. U., Añel, J. A., Mahajan, A. S., de la Torre, L., Sonke, J. E., Feinberg, A., Gomez Martin, J. C., Villamayor, J., Travnikov, O., Wang, F., Bieser, J., Francisco, J. S., and Plane, J. M. C. and the Et. al: Role of the stratosphere in the global mercury cycle , EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-9890, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-9890, 2025.