HOUGHTON, MI-- Researchers at Michigan Technological University are working on a three-year project to better understand how airborne toxins spread.
The Houghton school says the work is funded by a $1.45 million grant from the National Science Foundation and is led by professor Judith Perlinger. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Desert Research Institute and Boston University are among others involved.
The researchers are focusing their work on mercury, PCBs and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which all can move from place to place with atmospheric currents. Together, the pollutants are known as atmosphere-surface exchangeable pollutants, or ASEPs.
Researchers plan to look at where pollutants originate, model the economic impacts in the U.S. and teach an online course about environmental problems.
