The History of Atmospheric Pollution from Copper Revealed by Greenland Ice
The history of lead pollution in the Northern hemisphere since the Greek and Roman civilizations was retraced three years ago by Claude Boutron and his team at the Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics Laboratory in Grenoble (LGGE, CNRS/UniversitŽ de Grenoble). It appeared that the Greeks and Romans had already polluted the atmosphere of the Northern hemisphere on a large scale nearly two thousand years before the industrial revolution. These results were obtained by analyzing GRIP (Greenland Ice Core Project) ice core samples taken at Summit in Greenland from 1990 to 1992 during a European program in which France took part. After analyzing lead pollution, the LGGE team set about analyzing copper pollution in the same ice core samples. The results obtained show that the ice in central Greenland has kept a trace of the history of copper production, in particular in ancient times. The researchers were able to determine that the fall-out from anthropic copper on the Greenland ice cap as a whole was ten times greater over a period starting 2,500 years ago and ending at the industrial revolution than over the period from the industrial revolution to the present day. These studies pave the way for a quantitative approach to paleometallurgy, which played an important part in the development of human societies.
15/7/96
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