#mercury-pollution

#mercury-pollution

Police and prosecutors from Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname have arrested nearly 200 people in their first joint cross-border operation targeting illegal gold mining in the Amazon region, authorities said. The operation was backed by Interpol, the EU and Dutch police specialising in environmental crime. It involved more than 24,500 checks on vehicles and people across remote border areas and led to the seizure of cash, unprocessed gold, mercury, firearms, drugs and mining equipment, Interpol said.

Porpoises in UK waters are being found with record rates of mercury in their livers, scientists have found. New research has found that mercury levels in British waters have increased over time, and that animals with higher levels are more likely to die from infectious disease. Analysing liver samples form 738 harbour porpoises found stranded on UK coastlines between 1990 and 2021, scientists found mercury concentrations in porpoise livers rose by 1 per cent each year.

An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report. About 540 square miles of land have been cleared for mining in the South American country since 1984, and the environmental destruction is spreading rapidly across the country, Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) and its Peruvian partner organisation, Conservacion Amazonica, found.