Development of a deep-sea mercury sensor using in situ anodic stripping voltammetry

Copyright © 2015 by The Geochemical Society of Japan. mercury in seawater can be an indicator of widespread underwater mineral deposits (Marumo et al., 2008; Tomiyasu et al., 2007). Therefore, deep-sea mercury monitoring is very important to both the caution of environmental pollution and the exploration of underwater mineral deposits. Due to their high sensitivity, cold vapor atomic absorption spectrometry (CV-AAS) (Chakraborty et al., 2014a, c), cold vapor atomic fluorescence spectrometry (CV-AFS) (Fernandez-Martinez et al., 2015), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) (Baya et al., 2015) have been the most commonly used for the measurement of total mercury. All of these techniques require expensive and sophisticated instrumentation combined with complicated sample preparation processes (Chakraborty et al., 2015; Ferreira et al., 2015; Giacomino et al., 2008). Sample collection needs certain spatial and temporal resolutions of the target fields, and there is a risk of contamination and/or loss of mercury during the sampling and transfer of water from depth to the surface Development of a deep-sea mercury sensor using in situ anodic stripping voltammetry