BAD hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the eighties that we鈥檇 rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers are generating a revival of toxic organic pollutants.
Christian Bogdal and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich studied levels of pollution in sediment at the bottom of the Oberaar lake in Bern, Switzerland. They found that banned chemicals, such as pesticides that have been linked with Parkinson鈥檚 disease, have been pouring into the lake at an increasing rate since the 1990s (Environmental Science & Technology, ).
Bogdal reckons that a glacier feeding the lake has been storing these chemicals for decades and is releasing them as it melts. This process could be dramatically sped up by global warming, he warns. Since these chemicals would have been spread around the globe before they settled into the ice, many other glaciers are probably contaminated too.
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There is little we can do, however. 鈥淪topping global warming could slow the melting of glaciers, but the chemicals will still be released eventually,鈥� says Bogdal.