Snow and ice can significantly affect the environmental fate of contaminants. This thesis presents a laboratory technique for measuring mercury in metamorphosing snow, and a computer model for organic contaminants in a seasonally ice covered ocean. The laboratory method to study the fate of mercury in snow was developed using laboratory-made snow of controlled composition made in a cold room, aged and melted, with mercury quantified in air, snow, and dissolved and particulate fractions of the melt water. It was found that the method gave a mass balance for mercury, and can be used to look at mercury fate in snow representative of different environments. The fugacity based fate and transport model for organic contaminants in a seasonally ice-covered ocean was parameterized to Barrow Strait, and tested against environmentally derived net air to sea water fluxes. It was found that the model could reproduce these environmental data.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/29526 |
| Date | 23 August 2011 |
| Creators | Mann, Erin |
| Contributors | Wania, Frank |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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