Onondaga Lake

Henry EA, Dodge-Murphy LJ, Bigham GN, Klein SM, Gilmour CC. 1995. Total mercury and methylmercury mass balance in an alkaline, hypereutrophic urban lake (Onondaga Lake, N.Y.). Water Air Soil Pollut 80 489 98. 

Wang W, Driscoll CT. 1995. Patterns of total mercury concentrations in Onondaga Lake, New York. Environ Sci Technol 29 2261-2266. 

Becker DS, Bigham GN. 1995. Distribution of mercury in the aquatic food web of Onondaga Lake, New York. Water Air Soil Pollut 80 563-571. 

Young TC, DePinto JV, Seger ES. 1982. Transport and fate of heavy metals in Onondaga Lake, New York, USA. Bull Environ Contam Toxicol 29 554-560. 

The Solvay Process, which was introduced for the manufacture of the industrially important chemical, soda ash , i.e. sodium carbonate (Na2C03), along the west shore of Onondaga Lake in 1884, was cheaper and less polluting than the existing Leblanc Process. Essentially, it made use of two cheap and plentiful naturally occurring substances in the area... 

Unfortunately, however, sales of CaCl2 from the Onondaga Lake plant failed to match those of Na2C03, with the result that excess CaC was allowed to be released into a tributary of the lake. In addition, substantial quantities of unmarketable salts (mainly CaCl2) from the Solvay Process were dumped daily into the lake. Furthermore, waste slurries pumped into diked beds along the lake shoreline resulted in... 

The effect of the deposition of CaC03, at up to 1.7 x lO" t per year, was to increase the sedimentation rate of the lake several-fold, with a large CaC03 delta where the major tributary, Ninemile Creek, flows into the lake, and create a layer of CaC03 about 1 m thick over the bottom sediments. As a result, Onondaga Lake became effectively a saturated solution of CaCOa, with a pH of 7.6-8.2, and, most unusually for a lake in the north-eastern USA, immune to both acid precipitation and phosphate-induced eutrophication, the latter largely being avoided as a consequence of... 

Effler S. W., Schimel K., and Millero E. J. (1986) Salinity, ionic strength, and chloride relationships in ion polluted Onondaga Lake, NY. Water Air Soil Pollut. 27, 169—180. 

Rowell H. C. (1996) PaleoUmnology of Onondaga Lake the history of anthropogenic impacts on water quality. Lake Reserv. Mgmt. 12, 35—45. 

Driscoll, C. T., S. W. Effler, and S. M. Doerr. 1994. Changes in inorganic carbon chemistry and deposition of Onondaga Lake, New York. Envir. Sci Technol. 28 1211-16. 

Matthews DA, Effier SW, Matthews CM. 2000. Ammonia and toxicity criteria in polluted Onondaga Lake, New York. Water Environ Res 72(6) 731-741. 

From 1969 to 1972, over 3,500 fish from New York State lakes and streams were collected and analyzed for mercury content (Eisenbud et al., 1978 Boulton and Hetling, 1972). Less than ten percent of these fish lad mercury levels above 1.0 mg Ife/Kg body weight, the present Lfriited States Food and Drug Administration "actionable level" for commercially caught fish. A sizable proportion of these fish were collected from Onondaga Lake, near Syracuse, New York, a body of water contaminated by discharges frcm a chlor-alkali plant. 

Are these mercury values for Cranberry Lake streams high or low They a2 e similar to levels reported for Lake Windemere (12 -29 ng/1) by Gardner (1978) and the unpublished work of Harris (1971). on the Oswegatchie River (17 - 72 ng/1) but sonewhat lower than Onondaga Lake, near Syracuse, New York contaminated by chlor-alkali plant residues. Buller s synoptic survey (1972) of mercury in surface waters of the Adirondack Mountain region yielded no samples above 500 ng/1 total mercury and 100 ng/1 soluble mercury. 

The higher mercury values in Onondaga Lake fish are caused, for the most part, by mercury contributions from a chlor-alkali plant during the 1960 s. Other areas identified, such as Lake Ontario, Lake Champlain, and the St. Lawrence River either have or have had in the past sources of mercury contamination. 

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