The study's lead authors -- Merritt Turetsky of Michigan State University and Jennifer Harden of the USGS -- worked with colleagues from the Canadian Forest Service and the National Center for Atmospheric Research to reconstruct 20 years of emissions data for the period 1980-1999. According to the authors, "Scenarios that coupled drought, fire severity, and burn area showed that boreal wildfire emissions of mercury ranged from less than 1 to >100 metric tons of mercury between small and large fire years." If climate change brings warming and drying to high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, burning of peatlands could become a significant source of global mercury emissions. The article is published in the September issue of Geophysical Research Letters (Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L16403, doi:10.1029/2005GL025595.)