Subject hopping rates

All the three groups of SVOCs concerned in this paper, namely PCBs, PBDEs and PAHs, are persistent and semi-volatile and subject to atmospheric transport to remote locations, through a series of deposition/volatilization hops, known as the grasshopper effect. As a result, these compounds have been detected in the Arctic and Antarctic samples in numerous studies. The major factors determining the long-range transport potential (LRTP) are the volatihty and the degradation rate, or half life of the SVOCs in the atmosphere. 

Schematic view of an electron travelling along the field direction in an ID system where a fraction x of the hopping sites carries a repulsive potential which a carrier has overcome either thermally or via tunnelling. Barriers are subject to a statistical distribution leading to a distribution p(W) of barrier crossing rates.

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