Mercury pollution has already spurred public health officials to advise eating less fish, but it could become a more pressing concern in a warmer world.

University of Michigan researchers have developed a new tool that uses natural "fingerprints" in coal to track down sources of mercury polluting the environment.

Forest fires and other blazes in the United States likely release about 30 percent as much mercury as the nation's industrial sources, according to initial estimates in a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Fires in Alaska, California, Oregon, Louisiana, and Florida emit particularly large quantities of the toxic metal, and the Southeast emits more than any other region, according to the research.

As a frequent addition to the list of America’s most polluted cities, Houston is no stranger to having more than just oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air. But a University of Houston study found a few surprising results in the air Houstonians breathe day in, day out: mercury and formaldehyde.

Could tons of neurotoxic mercury now stored in the United States wind up in the hands of poverty-stricken gold miners in developing countries and eventually be released into the environment, where it could end up entering the human food chain" An article scheduled for the May 28 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine, explores that possibility in a script that reads like an environmental version of the hit film, Blood Diamond.

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found a new and substantial pathway for mercury pollution flowing into coastal waters. Marine chemists have detected much more dissolved mercury entering the ocean through groundwater than from atmospheric and river sources.