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Just as there was gold in California’s hills, there was also mercury, including in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Though the Coast Range does not have the concentrations of mercury it once had, the impacts of a century or more of mining linger on.
There is a tale to tell of mercury accumulation in regional ecosystems, and telling it on Thursday evening, June 25, will be Tom Suchanek, a zoologist and research manager at the Western Ecological Research Center of the United States Geological Survey.
Mr. Suchanek’s talk, “Tracking mercury from ore to organism: mercury cycling and bioaccumulation in a mine-dominated ecosystem,” begins at 7 p.m. in Conference Room A of Building 3 at the USGS offices at 345 Middlefield Road in Menlo Park.
His talk will include Clear Lake, the largest freshwater lake in California, and a list of fish that are and are not safe to eat.
For more information, go to online.wr.usgs.gov/calendar/.
Regarding mercury in the Coast Range, it may be of interest that Calistoga is located in Napa County (there is no Calistoga County in California), and that Clear Lake is in Lake county, in the Cache Creek basin, a tributary to the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay. Cache Creek introduces approximately half the mercury delievered annually to the Sacramento River, and a good portion of that comes from the Sulphur Bank Mine on the edge of Clear Lake.
There may not be a Calistoga County in California, but there should be. I mean, think about it. It’s a perfect name for a county.