Post-Doctoral Research at Trent Featured in Science Magazine
Innovative study led by Dr. Ruoyu Sun is one of the first to use coral to track levels of mercury pollution
Groundbreaking research conducted at the state-of-the-art Water Quality Centre at Trent University by post-doctoral fellow Dr. Ruoyu Sun has made headlines, recently being featured in Science Magazine for his work.
The new study, “Two Centuries of Coral Skeletons from the Northern South China Sea Record Mercury Emissions from Modern Chinese Wars” published in Environmental Science & Technology, by Dr. Sun and his team is breaking new ground in the field as one of the first to examine mercury pollution in seawater using corals. Dr. Sun’s study, which investigates how mercury levels are recorded in annually banded coral skeletons, originally anticipated a gradual increase in mercury levels as observed in ice and peat cores. However, Dr. Sun’s study found that mercury pollution levels in corals parallel timelines of war, spiking during periods of conflict. This finding indicates that the history uses of explosives probably caused extensive mercury pollution in the ambient oceans, and suggests that the lifespan of atmospheric mercury might be significantly shorter than what we thought before, approximately one year.
Dr. Sun became involved with research at Trent after meeting the leading scholar professor, Dr. Holger Hintelmann, who supervised his research.
“Trent University gives me the freedom to conduct research on various interested topics,” says Dr. Sun. “Here, I am not limited to the contracted ones, and I have the freedom to collaborate with other international researchers on some challenging problems. This is very critical to enlarging and expanding my research domain.”
To further support the connection between historical periods of war and increases in mercury pollution, Dr. Sun is now planning on looking at the specific mercury isotopes located in the coral.
For students interested in publishing their research, Dr. Sun advises, “Try to think of questions from a different angle. Most of the published theories or methods are not 100% right, and are waiting to be challenged by you.”
The full article featured in Science News can be found here.