Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/03/2009 - 08:48
Forums
Ocean, Atmosphere, Sea Ice, and Snowpack Interactions

Hi my name is Kiara and my partner name is Jazmin. We attend East Palo Alto Academy and we live in California. Our teacher Ms. Galvan is going to do something like what your doing but is researching something different. In our physics class we are doing journals and learning about what you guys are doing over there. Me and my partner choose your topic because we don't really know anything about sea ice and how can it impact us? So we want to know more about it. How does Bromine smell like and would it affect people negatively if they were to eat the Bromine infested snow ice? Also is the smell of the snow stronger in some parts that in others?

Tue, 04/07/2009 - 21:10

Betsy Wilkening

Hello Kiara and Jazmin,
I'm finally getting around to answering your questions.  The OASIS project studied interactions between the Ocean, Atmosphere, Sea Ice and Snow. There will be projects coming up with PolarTREC that are looking at a loss of sea ice.  The OASIS project was trying to understand the transfer and interaction of different chemicals among all of the things listed above.  Some of these are pollutants like mercury and POPs (persistant organic pollutants) that bioaccumulate up the food chain.  Other things were nitrates, hydrogen peroxide, halogens, aldehydes, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and ozone.  They were trying to understand the interactions of all of these in the Arctic.  As the climate changes and the Arctic warms these interactions will be changing.
Bromine is a halogen that is probably coming from the ocean initially.  You would be familiar with the smell if you go to a friend's hot tub or a large public swimming pool.  It is used in place of chlorine to keep them clean.  The smell of bromine in the snow is something that the OASIS people were trying to understand better.  Bromine can lead to ozone depletion in the lower boundary of the atmosphere.  Ozone is a pollutant there, and it acts as a cleaning agent.  The scientists were trying to get air samples in canisters out in the snow fields where the smell was detected.  These were going to be taken home for analysis.
I was looking at the Bromine that I have to put in my hot tub at home.  It is recommended to have a bromine level of 3-5 ppm (parts per million).  8 ppm was listed as dangerous in the hot tub.  The levels that we were estimating that we smelled were probably in parts per trillion which would not be harmful to humans.
The smell was stronger in some places than others and on different days and different depths of the snow.  It also seemed dependent on wind direction.  We will have to wait and see if anything comes out of this observations as the scientists continue to take and analyze data.
If you have more questions, please write back.  I'll be checking even though I am no longer in Barrow.
Thanks. Betsy Wilkening
 

Tue, 01/03/2012 - 09:35

Anonymous

how does bromine impact your life?

Tue, 01/03/2012 - 17:05

Betsy Wilkening

Hello, The bromine that may have been in the snow would not affect humans at that low of a concentration. The scientists were interested in the presence of bromine because it can react with affect the concentration of other substances in the atmosphere. One of the things they were studying is something called an ozone depletion event. This occurs in the Arctic during the spring. We saw instances where ground level or tropospheric ozone would decrease in concentration. The bromine is involved in the chemistry that occurs to make this ozone depletion event happen.