Photo by Prentiss
H. Balcom
Postdoctoral
fellow Amina Schartup, the paper’s first author, aboard the “What’s Happening”
on Lake
Melville. In 2017,
a dam will flood a large region upstream from an estuarine fjord called Lake
Melville.
Hydroelectric energy may be more damaging to northern
ecosystems than climate change
(September 8, 2015) Colonial
New Delhi had a cobra infestation. To get rid of it, the government offered
bounties for dead cobras, inadvertently turning cobra breeding into a thriving
business. When the government got wise and canceled the program, thousands of
then worthless cobras were released into the city streets.
Today, the cobra effect means making a problem worse by
attempting to solve it.
Arctic regions don’t have a poisonous snake problem; they
have a poison problem.
The amount of methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, is
especially high in Arctic marine life but until recently, scientists haven’t
been able to explain why. Now, research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School
of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of
Public Health suggests that high levels of methylmercury in Arctic life are a
byproduct of global warming and the melting of sea-ice in Arctic and sub-Arctic
regions.
View of Lake
Melville from Rigolet, a Nunatsiavut community on the far eastern edge
of the lake. Photo
by Prentiss H. Balcom
To mitigate global warming, many governments are turning to
hydroelectric power. But, the research also suggests that methylmercury
concentrations from flooding for hydroelectric development will be far greater
than those expected from climate change.
The research, published in PNAS, began as a review of the
environmental impact assessment for the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam in
Labrador, Canada. In 2017, the dam will flood a large region upstream from an
estuarine fjord called Lake Melville.
The communities along the shores of Lake Melville are
predominantly Indigenous and rely on the lake as a primary source of food. One
of these communities — and two-thirds of Lake Melville — is part of
Nunatsiavut, the first autonomous region in Canada governed by Inuit. When the
impact report predicted no adverse downstream effects on Lake Melville, the
Nunatsiavut Government reached out to Elsie Sunderland, associate professor of
environmental engineering and environmental health, for help.
“All of the
methylmercury from the rivers feeding into Lake Melville (pictured) and from
the
sediment at the
bottom of the lake couldn’t account for the levels in the water,” said
postdoctoral
fellow Amina
Schartup. “There was something else going on here.” Photo by Prentiss H. Balcom
Four years later, that initial review has morphed into a
multi-pronged investigation that has led to important scientific discoveries
about how methylmercury accumulates in the ecosystem and how it will impact
communities who rely on the ecosystem for food and resources.
What’s happening
Sunderland and her team — including lab manager Prentiss H.
Balcom and postdoctoral fellow Amina Schartup, the paper’s first author — made
their first trip to Happy Valley Goose Bay, along the western shores of Lake
Melville, in 2012. There, they took a 10-day journey across the lake on a
fishing boat to measure baseline methylmercury levels.