Mercury pollution poses global human health and environmental risks. Although mercury is naturally present in the environment, human activities, such as coal burning, have increased the amount of mercury cycling among the land, atmosphere, and ocean by a factor of three to five. Emitted to the atmosphere in its elemental form, mercury travels worldwide before oxidizing to a form that deposits to ecosystems. In aquatic systems, mercury can convert into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. People and wildlife are exposed to methylmercury as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. Mercury continues to circulate in the atmosphere, oceans, and terrestrial system for centuries to millennia before it returns to deep-ocean sediments. Areas of uncertainty in the global biogeochemical cycle of mercury include oxidation processes in the atmosphere, land-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere cycling, and methylation processes in the ocean. National and international policies have addressed direct mercury emissions, but further efforts to reduce risks face numerous political and technical challenges.

[1] We use a global 3-D model of atmospheric mercury (GEOS-Chem) to interpret worldwide observations of total gaseous mercury (TGM) and reactive gaseous mercury (RGM) in terms of the constraints they provide on the chemical cycling and deposition of mercury. Our simulation including a global mercury source of 7000 Mg yr À1 and a TGM lifetime of 0.8 years reproduces the magnitude and large-scale variability of TGM observations at land sites. However, it cannot capture observations of high TGM from ship cruises, implying a problem either in the measurements or in our fundamental understanding of mercury sources. Observed TGM seasonal variation at northern midlatitudes is consistent with a photochemical oxidation for Hg(0) partly balanced by photochemical reduction of Hg(II). Observations of increasing RGM with altitude imply a long lifetime of Hg(II) in the free troposphere. We find in the model that Hg(II) dominates over Hg(0) in the upper troposphere and stratosphere and that subsidence is the principal source of Hg(II) at remote surface sites. RGM observations at Okinawa Island (Japan) show large diurnal variability implying fast deposition, which we propose is due to RGM uptake by sea-salt aerosols. Observed mercury wet deposition fluxes in the United States show a maximum in the southeast, which we attribute to photochemical oxidation of the global Hg(0) pool. They also show a secondary maximum in the industrial Midwest due to regional emissions that is underestimated in the model, possibly because of excessive dry deposition relative to wet (dry deposition accounts for 68% of total mercury deposition in the United States in the model, but this is sensitive to the assumed phase of Hg(II)). We estimate that North American anthropogenic emissions contribute on average 20% to U.S. mercury deposition.

[1] We develop a mechanistic representation of land-atmosphere cycling in a global 3-D ocean-atmosphere model of mercury (GEOS-Chem). The resulting land-oceanatmosphere model is used to construct preindustrial and present biogeochemical cycles of mercury, to examine the legacy of past anthropogenic emissions, to map anthropogenic enrichment factors for deposition, and to attribute mercury deposition in the United States. Land emission in the model includes prompt recycling of recently deposited mercury (600 Mg a À1 for present day), soil volatilization (550 Mg a À1), and evapotranspiration (550 Mg a À1). The spatial distribution of soil concentrations is derived from local steady state between land emission and deposition in the preindustrial simulation, augmented for the present day by a 15% increase in the soil reservoir distributed following the pattern of anthropogenic deposition. Mercury deposition and hence emission are predicted to be highest in the subtropics. Our atmospheric lifetime of mercury against deposition (0.50 year) is shorter than past estimates because of our accounting of Hg(0) dry deposition, but recycling from surface reservoirs results in an effective lifetime of 1.6 years against transfer to long-lived reservoirs in the soil and deep ocean. Present-day anthropogenic enrichment of mercury deposition exceeds a factor of 5 in continental source regions. We estimate that 68% of the deposition over the United States is anthropogenic, including 20% from North American emissions (20% primary and <1% recycled through surface reservoirs), 31% from emissions outside North America (22% primary and 9% recycled), and 16% from the legacy of anthropogenic mercury accumulated in soils and the deep ocean.