Concept information
Preferred term
NOBLEMET
Definition
- Short Title: NobleMet Proposal URL: http://classic.ipy.org/development/eoi/proposal-details.php?id=19 Due to modern industrial development, noble metals (platinum group elements-PGEs in short, such as Pt and Pd) are being used in a much broader field in recent decades. Over 20% of the goods produced in the West involve the use of PGEs somewhere in their manufacturing processes and Pt and Pd are the most widely used ones. Especially with automobile industry, noble metals and their compounds have been widely used as catalysts in automobile catalytic pollution control devices. Though those pollutants are mainly local, they are also transported to remote Arctic regions. What are the trends for those metals at present? How different comparing the current situation with the one in pre-industrial time period? Because one of the common characteristics for noble metals is reducing activation energy at reaction centres during chemical reactions and this characteristic could hold true for biochemical reactions, increasing worldwide pollution of PGEs may potentially exert affects on bio chemical reactions in the ecosystems and food chains. It is therefore of great value to investigate their past, present and trend in Arctic regions where undisturbed frozen water media preserves their archives. This proposal is addressing some of those questions, aiming to: 1.To develop precise methodologies to determine the concentrations of those noble metals in the Canadian High Arctic, down to fg/g level or 10-15 gram per gram in order to accurately quantify the content of those pollutants in the ice. This work will require special ultra-clean technique, equipment/facility and expertises, which GSC (Geological Survey Canada, NRCan) and UH (University of Heidelberg, Germany) currently holds; 2.To reconstruct a temporal trend of those noble metal pollutants in the Canadian High Arctic for at least 50 years, possibly tracing back to pre-industrial time. This work requires precise dating and multi-discipline knowledge, including glaciology, ice-physics, analytical chemistry, statistics and geochemistry et al. Both GSC and UH also holds expertise in these fields. The site for this study is tentatively selected to be on Agassiz ice cap, Nunavut, Canada (Northern Ellesmere Island: 80 deg 48.0 N 72 deg 52.5 W; asl 1800 m); 3.To investigate the spatial distribution of those noble metal pollutants on ice caps, at least 4 to 6 ice caps will be occupied; and 4.Hopefully to apportion the sources of the pollutants whenever possible with the achieved data. (en)
Broader concept
- M - O (en)
URI
https://gcmd.earthdata.nasa.gov/kms/concept/cecfd35d-d295-4a25-a2b7-8eb8f78bbc80
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