If you wish to join the Working Group please contract one of the Conveners - Jose Centeno at tonycent@comcast.net or Brian Marker at brian@amarker.freeserve.co.uk

Background

The IUGS/GEM Working Group on Dust is concerned with the improvement of investigation and understanding of both dust and other particulates such as PM10s and finer emissions. It has been estimated that as much as 2 billion tonnes of dust is entrained in the atmosphere per annum Exposure to dust in the open environment is usually accepted as a fact of life, while exposure to dust in the workplace is regulated to a greater or lesser degree in many countries. While the impacts of dust from industrial processes on human health is well recognised and widely regulated, less attention has been paid to dust from geological sources and to less visually obvious finer particulates. This is, perhaps, due to information being widely scattered in scientific papers with few, if any, widely accessible syntheses of the key facts. Also, research is in many respects at an early stage because of practical difficulties of observing, monitoring and sampling diffuse aerosols in the complexly moving atmospheric column. However, dust performs an important function in the atmosphere, with individual particles acting as nucleation centres for droplets that become precipitation (rain, snow etc) that is essential to life and geomorphological processes. Deposited dust may also, in time, add beneficially to soil formation. There is a need to promulgate present knowledge more widely and to identify matters that need more research in order to address the impacts on people, agriculture, livestock and the natural environment. This is made more imperative because climate change is altering the scale and nature of impacts. 

Goals

The aim is to improve responses to emissions of dust and other particulates. The objectives are to:

a) review, collate and disseminate material on the existing understanding of the nature, behaviour and impacts of dust and particulates in the earth system and to stimulate new investigations into associated under-researched areas;

b) review existing legislation, regulation and management responses and to set out good practices in forms that can be readily appreciated and followed by administrators, land managers and the public; and

c) to develop and disseminate innovative approaches to dealing with dust issues.

The Group will organise conference sessions and aims to produce a book on emissions of dust from geological sources by 2013-2014.

Membership

The Working Group requires new members and assistance. If you are interested in these issues, please get in touch now with brian@amarker.freeserve.co.uk so that you can be kept informed of progress and events. Please provide name, institute/affiliation, address, telephone number, e-mail address, personal web page if any, and a brief list of your main activities/interests in dust issues. Also indicate whether or not you are willing to have contact details (name and e-mail address) listed in the Dust Working Group website.

Recent news

A successful inception meeting was held in Windhoek, Namibia in October 2010. Papers were given on abandoned mines and on environmental management of the uranium mining sector in Namibia that referred to potentially harmful elements in dust. A visit to an abandoned copper mine at Klein Aub allowed observation of dust emissions from the tailings dam. Dust arising from traffic in and near the Namib Desert demonstrated that dust is a fact of life in this arid landscape that is merely added to by mining, but key issues are the presence or absence of potentially harmful elements and the degree and duration of exposure to these. Useful links were established with local researchers working on environmental assessments of mining proposals in Namibia, agreed to seek potential collaborators in the region.

One of the conveners of the Working Group, Jose Centeno, gave a keynote talk on dust and medical geology at the 23^rd Colloquium on African Geology in Johannesburg, South Africa (January 2011).

The other convener, Brian Marker, attended the International Association on Engineering Geology and the Environment Congress in Auckland (September 2010) to identify contacts with particular regard to dust from soil erosion in Australia.

The Group also approached 13 international scientific associations and unions to see whether these wished to collaborate in the initiative. Three nominated representatives to maintain contacts. These were the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), International Union of Forestry Research Organisations (IUFRO) and International Association of Vulcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI). ISPRS kindly invited members of the group to participate in their 2011 Symposium on Advances in Geospatial Technologies for Health.