Dirty secrets In the snow

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Dirty secrets In the snow

Some of the data-collection sites are four- or five-day trips on skis for

USGS ecologist Dan Fagre and assistants. Here, the crew returns from Granite

Park in Glacier National Park with sleds full of snow samples.

Photos courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK - Ingersoll slipped one ski in front of the

other, again and again and again, sliding across snow, across bits of

Montana, pieces of Washington, tiny molecular fragments of China and India.

To get to the top of Glacier National Park's Apgar Mountain, Ingersoll skied

mile after mile across the invisible litter of the world. A scientist

studying snow chemistry, Ingersoll is working on the old adage that what

goes up must, in fact, come down. And so he goes up to see what's come down.

What goes up into the regional atmosphere in the form of sulfates, nitrates

and ammoniums, for instance, must come down in winter snows. And what lands

up on Apgar Mountain must come down yet again, gushing in a great spring

flush.

Likewise, what goes up into the global atmosphere in the form of pesticides,

DDT, mercury and industrial pollutants must also come down in winter snows.

And again, what lands up in Glacier is bound to come down in the spring.

Cold and blustery climes such as the tops of Glacier Park's peaks are

chemical reservoirs of sorts, Ingersoll said, holding eight or nine months

worth of precipitation locked in snow and ice. Now scientists are turning an

eye to what happens each spring when those chemicals pulse down in a

flooding rush, washing through relatively pristine soils, lakes and streams.

" You might say you don't really care what's happening with pollutants in

remote, high-elevation mountain lakes, " said Dan Fagre. " But you should

care, because in a couple months it will be flowing down a river near you. "

Fagre is a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, studying

climate change from his offices in Glacier National Park. His back yard is

the northern-most stop for fellow USGS researcher Ingersoll, who

collaborates with agencies such as the National Park Service and Forest

Service to study snowpack chemistry in mountains from New Mexico to the

Canadian border.

After nearly 10 years in the field, Ingersoll and his colleagues have built

up the biggest snowpack survey in the world, focusing on the icy heights of

America's Rocky Mountains.

Ingersoll is based in Colorado, where remote and " pristine " basins have for

years shown unnatural loads of nitrates. Nitrogen is a key plant food, Fagre

said, and as underwater plants bloomed amid the nitrate-laden meltwater, the

ecology of Colorado's cold, clear, nutrient-poor mountain lakes began to

change.

And that was bad news for trout and other species that preferred the natural

habitat.

It was as if these mountain ecosystems were getting too much of a good thing

all in one shot; as if somebody who always took one vitamin a day decided to

hold off for eight months and then swallowed two bottles all at once.

While the same nitrogen concentrations were falling in raindrops at low

elevations, those doses were coming as steady storms, a little bit at a

time. The snowpack, however, worked as a reservoir, holding back as much as

70 or 80 percent of the year's precipitation for nine months and then

sending a one-time chemical rush downstream each spring. In addition, levels

of atmospheric nitrogen have been more than doubled by humans since the

dawning of the industrial age, further amplifying the polluting impacts of

spring runoff.

Over time, Ingersoll began to pinpoint sources of the chemical pollutants -

large coal-fired power plants topped the list, joined by automobile exhaust,

snowmobile emissions, and other industrial sources - that caused acid snow,

a cold-climate cousin of the more well-known acid rain.

Related studies showed increased humidity along Colorado's eastern front

range, the result of agricultural irrigation. It was enough to affect local

weather patterns, Fagre said, and contributed to the thunderstorms that

swept off the prairie and dumped moisture in the Rocky Mountains. Along the

way, those storms picked up fertilizer from fields and ammonia from

stockyards, adding to the chemical stew locked on wintry peaks.

That research got Fagre to wondering if Montana's mountains were similarly

affected.

Meanwhile, Canadian scientists were digging through snow 150 miles north of

Glacier Park, discovering that the world is indeed a very small place.

In remarkably remote basins, places that took days to ski into, the

Canadians were finding toxic levels of pesticides and other chemicals in

trout. These " persistent organic pollutants, " including DDT and dioxins,

were a long way from home.

Many of the chemicals found have been banned for years throughout North

America. Yet here they were, building up in the tissue of fish living in

what had been considered Mother Nature's last unsullied strongholds.

Then, in 1998, satellite images provided a hint that helped unlock the

mystery. Those images showed a plume of dust, rising from a massive sand

storm in China's Gobi Desert, trailing around the globe astride a powerful

jet stream.

Analysis of dust collected throughout the Rockies confirmed suspicions - it

was indeed China's sand. And the poisonous chemicals in Canada's fish were

indeed Asia's pollutants, compounds of such light molecular weight that they

were easily carried halfway around the world.

Those two realizations - that Colorado's mountain snows were trapping

regional air pollutants and that Canada's snowpacks were trapping global

chemical pollutants - inspired Fagre to begin digging around in Glacier

Park's wintry world.

He understood the presence of nitrates and sulfates and ammoniums in

Colorado, but the " persistent organic pollutants, " or " POPs, " were something

of a mystery. How did such high levels of these chemicals build up in

otherwise pristine lakes?

The answer, it turned out, is the " grasshopper effect. "

The chemicals discovered by the Canadians are extremely volatile, and in

warm conditions easily vaporize into a gaseous form and zap back into the

atmosphere. Then they cool, condense, fall as rain, sink into soils, warm

under the sun, and zap back up again, leaping around the globe like

grasshoppers.

But it takes warmth to volatilize POPs; when they land in cold mountain

lakes or on perennial snowpacks or atop icy glaciers, they stay put, a

phenomenon called the " cold condensation effect. "

Cold mountaintops, then, are POPs magnets, and the fish that live in

mountain lakes are POPs sponges, accumulating the pollutants over time.

" The question was, " Fagre said, " is this sort of thing happening here in

Montana, in Glacier Park? "

The answer meant climbing Glacier's steep backcountry when snows were at

their deepest, digging pits all the way down to frozen dirt, sometimes

through nearly 20 feet of snow. Fagre and his team dug snow samples at high

elevation and low, on the east side of the Continental Divide and on the

west. Ingersoll, meanwhile, skied up other mountains, digging his own

snowpits and collecting his own samples.

Ultimately, Fagre's work became part of the data being collected by

Ingersoll, a northern cluster of sample sites on the long route between

Glacier Park and Taos, N.M.

But even now, with three years of samples behind him, Fagre still is

hesitant to draw too many conclusions from his findings.

" Science takes a while, " he cautioned.

He has coupled his mountaintop work with a stream-monitoring program,

measuring chemical concentrations in the snowmelt that burbles past

campgrounds each summer in clear, cold brooks.

Once that data is correlated with the snowpack information, scientists will

try to determine what effects the chemical pollutants have on soil biota and

aquatic life, he said.

" The levels we've seen in Glacier so far are certainly high enough to be

influencing some of our mountain ecosystems, " he said, " but not to the

degree of what they've seen in Colorado. "

But any fundamental change to an ecosystem will likely result in larger

changes down the road, Fagre said. Change the snow chemistry and you change

the soil chemistry; change the soil chemistry and you change the plants.

Change the plants and you change the insects. Change the insects and you

change the critters that eat the insects, and the critters that eat the

critters that eat the insects, and so on up the food chain.

Of course, at the end of that chain is humanfolk, living in the low lands

that inevitably will collect what went up, once it comes back down.

Already, scientists have determined that tiger salamanders can be greatly

impacted by artificially acidic pH levels commonly observed in Colorado's

most remote wilderness lands. Samples of meltwater in and around the Mount

Zirkel Wilderness Area showed salamander eggs dead or nonviable due to

acidity, and those that hatched successfully often matured more slowly and

were less able to catch and eat tadpoles.

Boreal toads, chorus frogs, northern leopard frogs and wood frogs also died

in the acid snow runoff. Even rainbow trout eggs and fry showed increased

mortality.

Scientists in the low lands are starting to see the effects in popular

waterways such as Flathead Lake, where officials are issuing warnings about

mercury buildup in sport fish. Even tiny amounts of mercury - thought to be

originating in far-flung sites around the globe and falling here with rain

and snow - can cause sickness, birth defects and death.

The fact is, no matter where you live in the world, no matter how remote or

pristine your back yard, there is no way to avoid toxic chemicals from the

other side of the globe. Every nation, every industrial plant and every

individual, all share the same atmosphere, and that atmosphere is becoming

increasingly clouded with chemical pollutants. If you live where it rains,

expect a slow, steady dose. If you live under snowy peaks, expect a

once-a-year flood.

" We're all awash in this global chemical soup, " Fagre said, " and so we have

to change our focus. We used to be concerned about being down wind of a

factory or a city; now, we're thinking in terms of global air movements. "

And those global air movements have folks like Kathy Tonnessen worried, as

she looks to the probable future of any number of developing countries.

Tonnessen is a Park Service research coordinator, and has 20 years of

experience studying the interaction of air and surface water in Western

mountains. She recognizes that airborne pollutants held in snowpack can

acidify streams when released, can change soil biota, impact water quality,

affect plants and animals.

Although the United States and Canada have cleaned up their act somewhat

with regard to nitrates, sulfates, amoniums and even POPs, she said, other

countries are just gearing up to become major polluters.

" The problem will get worse before it gets better, " Tonnessen predicts, " and

it will come from Asia, India, Japan, China, Korea. "

An air mass can cruise from China to Olympic National Park in five days, she

said, bringing along with it any number of chemical compounds.

Which is why Ingersoll can be said to be skiing across bits and pieces of

Asia as he slogs his way to the top of Apgar Mountain. His work in this

wintry world is helping to define the parameters of the problem, giving

guidance to those who are trying to forge solutions.

One solution under consideration is to just eat the pollution.

Bio-engineers

are hard at work trying to find bugs that will consume the stuff,

effectively scrubbing the atmospheric environment, but the clock is ticking.

Another possible solution, called the " dirty dozen " treaty, is expected to

be signed in Stockholm this May, when the nations of the world gather to

collectively ban the 12 worst POPs.

But these " persistent organic pollutants " are not called persistent for

nothing, and a ban will take years to show effects. The United States banned

DDT years ago, and still the poison volatilizes out of domestic soil,

leaping like a grasshopper into mountain lakes where it is caught by the

cold.

" We have our own problems that will be hard enough to solve, but the real

huge threat will be the Third World across the Pacific, " Tonnessen said.

" China is the biggie. "

As China and India attempt to create modern industrial economies and work to

feed their billions of citizens, she said, chilly spots like the Arctic and

the Rockies can expect to collect the fallout.

" When they get the technology we have, the nitrogen load into the atmosphere

will be staggering, " she said. " And we will be on the receiving end of all

of it. "

The United States already is cleaning up, she said, and along with Canada is

helping Mexico run a cleaner economy, all in hopes of avoiding more acid

rain and snow.

" But guess what folks - it's still out there, right across the ocean, " she

said, " and all it takes is a couple days of wind to bring it snowing down on

a Montana mountain. "