By Hannah Brock
Capital News Service
Toxins from harmful algal blooms are well-known as water polluters, but now researchers are looking at how they harm Great Lakes air.
And that could have implications for human health, they say.
Particles of water emerge into the air when waves break, said Andrew Ault, a chemistry professor and researcher of aerosols at the University of Michigan. Those particles sometimes contain toxins.
“This is one of the largest sources of particles getting kicked up into the atmosphere globally, but the Great Lakes are really different,” Ault said.
Scientists have studied particles emerging from the ocean for decades, he said. But freshwater aerosols, like those from the Great Lakes region, have been studied for only about a decade.
Aerosols are liquids or solids suspended in gas, said Haley Plaas, a doctoral student and aerosol researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For example, COVID-19 can be spread through aerosols, and that is one reason why people wear masks.
Plaas published a study about airborne toxins from algal blooms in the journal “Environmental Science & Technology.”
Her study’s most important takeaway is that evidence suggests harmful toxins and algae itself are found in the air, she said, and airborne algal toxins may be more of a threat in the Great Lakes than previously thought.
Scientists are unsure how much toxin is in the air, how weather and water quality affect it and how it can affect human health, Plaas said. Right now, more research is needed to understand what inhaling this toxin could mean for respiratory health.
“A main concern is for people who live near these bodies of water that experience the blooms, and also for people using it recreationally, like jet skiing, boating, fishing,” Plaas said.
The wake from a boat is especially troublesome because that’s a source of bubble-bursting that can make the toxins airborne, she said.
Ault has published several papers on aerosols and is working on one that shows that algae toxins in the Great Lakes are getting into the air.
He said he plans to work with engineers and modelers to develop a risk system to help people avoid poor air quality from algal blooms.
Then he’d like to work with epidemiologists to relate exposure to health, he said. “That’s kind of the trajectory of where we see this going.”
A lack of research about harmful algal blooms and air quality is in part due to insufficient funding, Ault said.
“We need to show that it’s important for people to get excited to fund it,” Ault said. “We’re going through that cycle, but I wouldn’t say that funding agencies have paid much attention to it yet.”
Funding has primarily come from local agencies rather than national ones, he said.
Algae blooms occur because of a warming climate and nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from activities like agriculture, said Judy Westrick, a chemistry professor at Wayne State University and a researcher who has worked with Ault.
In the Great Lakes region, algal blooms occur in inland lakes and the western basin of Lake Erie, primarily in shallow water, Westrick said.
Research focuses on water quality because of observations, Westrick said. When people became sick after swimming in toxic water, scientists began researching it.
However, now that water quality is better understood, scientists are branching out into understanding algae toxins and air, Westrick said.
“You’re probably going to see, in probably the next year, like 100 studies on aerosol,” Westrick said. “Aerosol has become a big thing because of a couple of factors.”
Those factors are part of climate change, she said. For example, heavy rainfall can cause waves and break up harmful algae, releasing particles that could be toxic in the air.
Westrick and Ault plan to study living algae being broken apart by waves and how they affect air quality, she said. Once algae breaks apart, it dies and may release toxins into the water.
The expert consensus is algae blooms will get worse as climate change and runoff worsen, Westrick said.
Algae essentially eat nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients from agricultural runoff.
“If you take care of the nutrients and you don’t have the nutrient load, then then they won’t get worse, but if everything stayed the same, the nutrient load, and it just gets warmer, we expect them to go longer,” Westrick said.
However, Ault said people shouldn’t panic about airborne algae toxins.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, such as not walking in an algae bloom or participating in recreational activities near it, he said.
Hannah Brock reports for Great Lakes Echo.
