HR: 1340h
AN: ED13A-0721    [Abstracts]
TI: Industrial Lead in the Global Environment
AU: * Flegal, A R
EM: flegal@etox.ucsc.edu
AF: A. Russell Flegal, Environmental Toxicology,WIGS,UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 United States
AU: Ericson, J E
EM: jeericso@uci.edu
AF: Jonathon E. Ericson, Environmental Health, Science, and Policy, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-7070 United States
AB: Although the rates of emission, fluxes and recycling of natural and industrial lead in biogeochemical systems are needed to quantify environmental lead pollution, those geochemical processes are rarely incorporated in either Earth Science or Environmental Health Science curriculum. The need for an understanding of the global lead cycle in those diverse fields is due to the omnipresence of industrial lead contamination that was initiated over five millennia ago, which has often exceeded natural emissions of lead by orders of magnitude. That contamination has been repeatedly demonstrated in environmental analyses ranging from the most remote polar regions and oceans of the Earth to urban and industrial regions. The latter include studies of soil lead in Baltimore, New Orleans, St. Paul-Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Tijuana, and Ottawa, which show that lead from past combustion of leaded gasoline remains in those cities and it is bioavailable. With the protracted residence time of that soil lead (10$^{2}$ - 10$^{3}$ years), it is estimated that generations of urban children will continue to be exposed to this toxicant, unless there is abatement. Moreover, many third world countries are still using leaded gasoline and other sources of industrial lead continue to be emitted into the environment, albeit at reduced levels. Consequently, the geochemical cycling of lead is and will continue to be a most appropriate and topical subject of study in the curriculum of earth science and environmental health science.
DE: 4857 Pollution
DE: 5462 Polar regions
DE: 0345 Pollution--urban and regional (0305)
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
DE: 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting