Tom Kimball

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The San Francisco Bay-Delta is the largest estuary on the west coast of the United States. Since the mid 1800's San Francisco Bay and the connecting Delta has been heavily impacted by mercury contamination and now many fish species exceed advisory levels for human consumption. Yet the methods to clean up the Bay-Delta complex remain unclear. I will be examining the Delta mercury methylation potential in incubated sediment cores in order to understand the relative significance of source materials and receiving sediments to the transformation of elemental and ionic mercury into the neurotoxic methylmercury. This study will attempt to gather locally obtained evidence that inorganic mercury load reductions will result in decreases in organic mercury concentrations in sediment. This study will then be expanded to the mesoscale in order to develop an ecosystem approach to methylmercury mitigation.