For the last year the AP has led the way in strenuous reporting on pharmaceutical residues in drinking water. Today its Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza, and Justin Pritchard continue reporting results published, it appears, nowhere else. They find that government records show that, over an unspecified period of time, 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals have been dumped into U.S. waterways that, often, are also sources of drinking water.

Previous posts on this enterprising project’s results, and related news, include:

• March 10, 2008: (UPDATE 2*) AP: Want to take a drug? Try the tap. Your water probably has a bunch of drugs in it (pretty dilute, though)     ;
• Sept. 12, 2008: AP: Wire service’s enterprise testing finds more tap water with traces of presciption drugs     ;
• Jan 26, 2009: AP: In India, bathing in the Ganges is supposed to be a spiritual cure; but in one drug-polluted waterway it’s a medical free for all   (related, but not part of main project) ;

One finds few answers to the “so what?” question other than a few generalities (…”researchers have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of drugs harm fish, frogs, and other aquatic species…human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed …. even in small amounts, could harm humans over decades.” To answer fully would take far more than a wire service can be expected to provide – a giant project backed by CDC, NIH, and NSF combined might fall short. Thus the AP is providing a public service to shine a spotlight on these numbers. However, and it is a big however, the story today does not, as the previous ones did not, offer much perspective. The dumping apparently is legal. The quantities are “trace amounts.” As The Tracker has noted before, the public is entitled to a monitoring system that guarantees that only tiny amounts of such things reach the tap. And the amounts are, it appears, small. Water also contains trace amounts (and sometimes more) of heavy metals, radioisotopes, infectious viruses and microbes, detergents, pesticides, insect and dead animal bits, fertilizers, plasticizers, and just about everything else we’d prefer not to drink – all a tribute to the sensitivity of modern assays.

I have decidedly mixed feelings here. It takes heroic, admirable data mining to get figures like this. But to just hammer the public with big numbers and multi-syllabic names of compounds (warfarin, fluorouracil, pentobarbital, tetracycline, ….) is not analysis.

Nonetheless – I know…I’m waffling – surely there are, among all the dumpings and chemicals, cases where serious human or ecological harm has ensued. And after this story runs, sales of those madly absurd plastic bottles of drinking water may ratchet higher. I just spent a few nights at a DC hotel with a big oh-so-tasteful-looking, supposedly carbon-neutral bottle of drinking water sitting on the shelf after being shipped all the way from an artesian well in Fiji! Gad.

-CP

  The Anchorage Daily News is Alaska’s largest newspaper by far, but one suspects it’s not all that large (circ. about 70,000 daily, one learns) and that it likely has the same financial and staffing problems as has nearly every metro in the nation. And using wires for local news has surely been underway there as long as it has everywhere else since the AP began taking form with a pony express system in 1846.

All that said, it is notable that the AP‘s Mary Pemberton provided its story, along with the same yarn in the Fairbanks News-Miner (The Juneau Empire: AP, too) that raises the curtain for a UN-affiliated conference in Anchorage among representatives of indigenous peoples around the world – including of course Alaskan Eskimos, Indians, and Canada’s (Greenland’s too?) Inuit. The topic is the ways that climate change appears to be complicating life for them. The conference goes on all week. The Tracker hopes to check later this week to see what the town paper does to cover the actual meeting.  Pemberton’s story is a standard, and well-reported, collection of remarks by some of the meeting’s participants, including Alaskans, and description of the meeting’s organizers and its theme. Doubtless, a few bloggers and tweeters will be there too.

The ADN has often done a good job covering serious news. This site has tracked a good number of solid pieces by its reporters over the last few years (and an interesting one, here, by a non-staffer). Plus, in the weather-related enterprising news dept (cheap shot alert): it did cover the fur bikini contest.

One more thing: For today’s reminder that readers’ comment files tend, universally, to elicit a few thoughtful and a lot that are not so much constructive or cerebral thoughts, take a look at the Fairbanks New-Miner’s comments. Honestly, why newspapers and other news outlets permit anonymous remarks is beyond me. These are letters to the editor and should be vetted and treated as such – and attributed to the authors’ real names.

Grist for the Mill:

Northern Research Network: Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change announcement;  meeting Website (includes links to webcast, impressive list of sponsors, other info);

-CP

While NASA’s employees, and NASA-watchers, speculate on when they will get a new boss, the previous helmsman, Michael Griffin, has landed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. There, judging by media reports, he is getting a warm welcome and a pretty good pay stub.

The pic is not intended to make Griffin look just a wee goofy. It is a screenshot off the video linked just below. It is hard to time such things to catch a cheerful smile!

Stories:

• Huntsville Times – Lee Roop: Griffin hire called ‘a win’ for UAH ; Right up there with the football coach (and in ‘Bama, football coaches are huge). Includes a video of the annuncement.
• Birmingham News – Hannah Wolfson : University of Alabama in Huntsville hires former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin as eminent scholar ; His pay: $350,000 per year.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano – Former NASA chief gets new gig ; Blog post, a shorty in which Vergano notes that Griffin’s predecessor, Sean O’Keefe, also landed at a southern university.

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) After scientists and good journalists have tried to explain what GMO are, and to give a balanced view of their possible risks, now a cartoonist from the most influential Spanish newspaper boils it down to a short, understandable, but highly simplistic message: “you don’t want to eat this – it’s toxic”

Darwin nos libre de intentar evaluar aquí la seguridad para la salud, el medioambiente, o las respectivas economías, de los alimentos modificados genéticamente.

Si algo hemos aprendido tras tantos años de interminable -pero necesario- debate sobre los transgénicos, es que el asunto es tremendamente complejo, encontramos fuentes de información parciales en ambos extremos, y no debemos dar mensajes simplistas que puedan generar alarma social en un público que está muy sensibilizado en este tema.
Todo lo contrario hace –seguro sin mala intención- el dibujante Ramón en su viñeta de El Pais.

Con la efectividad para transmitir mensajes que caracteriza a las tiras cómicas, Ramón arroja el argumento nada científico pero muy convincente: Si un OMG mata insectos, también debe ser dañino para ti.Obvio, no? ¿Cómo se les ha podido pasar por alto a tantos expertos?

Ironías a parte, los científicos y buenos periodistas llevan muchísimo tiempo esforzándose en lidiar  de manera objetiva con este peliagudo asunto, y sacrificando titulares contundentes por informaciones menos atractivas pero más neutrales que posiblemente sean más cercanas a la realidad. Por eso encontrarte de golpe con este desafortunado cómic, es un flaco favor a la construcción de una opinión pública bien informada sobre transgénicos.

Quizás la ocurrencia de tratar el asunto viene del anuncio del gobierno Alemán de prohibir una variedad de maíz transgénico (el MON 810) que provee la estadounidense Montanto. O de la sesgadísima entrevista que Imma Sanchís realiza en la fresca y estimulante pero en contadas ocasiones un pelín pseudocientífica sección “La Contra” de La Vanguardia.
Comparemos un segundo ambas informaciones.

Como bien informa para Público Guillem Sans, Alemania ha decidido vetar una variedad concreta de maíz que lleva un gen específico contra un insecto llamado “el taladro del maíz”. Sin entrar en detalles ni valoraciones, sus razones tendrán. Bien podría ser que ese maíz fuera perjudicial para la salud, el medioambiente, o los intereses económicos de la agricultura alemana. Aquí no nos metemos. Sin embargo, el turbador titular de La Vanguardia es categórico: “Los transgénicos son tóxicos para la salud humana”

Esto, que desgraciadamente se repite en demasiadas ocasiones, es un absurdo sinsentido si nos atenemos a un par de nociones básicas sobre lo que es un organismo modificado genéticamente: Se realiza una alteración en el ADN (esto no es nocivo de por si) que introduce, elimina, o cambia alguna característica del organismo. De todas la modificaciones diferentes que se hagan, algunas podrían generar productos dañinos y otras no. Y algunas quizás podrían contaminar otros cultivos y otras no. Cada caso es diferente, y así debería ser analizado y tratado por los periodistas. De ninguna manera los transgénicos no son sanos ni nocivos “de por si”, como insinua la viñeta de El Pais y afirma la entrevista de La Vanguardia.

Más información sobre la prohibición en Alemania:

El Pais – Raúl Méndez explica que el maiz vetado por Alemania es el transgénico más común en España (allí crece el 75% de toda la producción europea), y que el gobierno español mantiene su apoyo a los transgénicos.

La Nación (Argentina) también añade que sí se siembra en Argentina (el único país de Latinoamérica según La Nación de Paraguay), y sus exportaciones no están a riesgo.

- PE

In San Francisco yesterday the US Sec’y of the Interior, Ken Salazar, presided over a public hearing to gather comment on a possible expansion of West Coast offshore oil exploration and extraction. Activists of many sorts, and a few plain folks who doubt an eco-catastrophe would occur and it’s better to burn our oil rather than import it, showed up.

In advance of the meeting, important perspective came in the San Jose Mercury News from its longtime environmental writer Paul Rogers. He anticipated the ruckus at the meeting, but right in the headline and near the top his story declares that chances are very dim for any substantial increase in the number of offshore rigs.  His report also provided the picture, showing what many fear will be multiplying at the seashore. (Tracker can’t help it – I have since I was a kid on Rincon Beach, Ventura, thought those things look cool).

Stories from the Hearing and the sidewalk outside:

• SF Chronicle – Jane Kay: Offshore drilling foes protest federal plan;  Speaker Pelosi, and some faux polar bears told Salazar NO. And, she reports, Salazar sat down with the paper’s editorial board and explained why he’s going ahead with the hearings. Another administration proposed the lease sale, and he mentioned “an effort to clean out as much of th bad as we can.”
• LA Times – Maria L. La Ganga  : Californians voice concerns to Obama administration over offshore drilling ;
• Reuters – Clare Baldwin: Californians says “baby, baby, no more drilling” ;

Grist for the Mill: Dept. of Interior sked for Outer Continental Shelf hearings.

  While a few circles that confuse politics with science (actually, they DO overlap) go back and forth insisting our weather woes are partly our fault, no they’re not they’re natural cycles, and so on, a larger reality intrudes today. BOTH provide plenty of peril. In Science magazine a team of ten scientists from six US universities report that recent droughts in West Africa, including one in the Sahel near the Sahara, represent just the latest expression of the region’s tendency to fall into drought as great or greater than the last. Lake sediments and drowned trees in Ghana reveal “severe, protracted droughts lasting from decades to centuries have occurred repeatedly .. over the past few millennia.” Forecast intensified drying as a result of global warming, of course, doesn’t help one whit – and the researchers say the region’s hard pressed governments and other agencies “should move fast” to make contingency plans.

With a boost from an NSF teleconference on Wednesday, news of the report is getting wide circulation. At the NYTimes Andrew C. Revkin does the news for both the print edition, and in more politically reflective terms at his Dot Earth Blog. The former employs dramatic language: “..a drumbeat of potent drought, far long and more severe than any experienceed recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa…” with more such mega droughts inevitable. The latter is his effort, dispassionately as possible, to do a biopsy of sorts on how touchy a topic natural variability is in context of worries over climate change – and he lets various scientists weigh in with their thoughts.

At AP, Randolph E. Schmid starts off, “West Africa is already living on the edge..” and hustles to add this new dollop of dread. Past episodes of shriveled lakes and blasted landscapes, a source tells him, will surely recur but this time “global warming will make these  droughts a lot hotter.” The comment rather reminds one of the recent news, from the US Southwest, that trees there are already in trouble as the standard pace of  droughts occurs with a few ticks of the thermometer on top (previous post).

The Arizona Star did both the story of southwest US droughts (check the link in previous sentence) and West Africa droughts, with two different reporters on them. Today’s story by Aaron Mackey does the news competently but does not note the parallel. Considering the nature of the next post down today, one must be grateful that the Star still has the staff to put two different reporters on such similar topics. But Mackey ought still have seen the resonance (perhaps he did – but did not have room for it).

Other Stories:

• BBC – Richard Black: West Africa faces ‘megadroughts’ ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko : Climate change could worsen African ‘megadroughts’ ;
• Cleveland Plain Dealer – John Mangels : Long pattern of West Africa droughts could worsen with climate change ; As with the Arizona paper, this is a local story for Mangels, via an author at Univ of Akron. His choice of quote (from another prof) is apt: Policy makers “really have to think what will happen if a drought occurs and just neer stops, on a generational time scale.” But, one thinks further, perhaps they don’t have to think about it long. Nobody does, or will, know what to do about it so let’s just cross our fingers on that one.
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne – Catastrophic droughts in Africa are the norm, claim scientists ; His angle is those were not our fault. The sharp photo of feet and cracked mud ran with this story.
• Afrik.com – Konye Obaji Ori :Ghana and West Africa to brace for mega drought ; Notice from a news service based in Paris but aimed at regions where this news matters most.

Grist for the Mill:

Science magazine abstract ;  Univ. Texas-Austin Press Release; Univ. Arizona Press Release ; NSF Press Release ;  NSF Teleconference audio ;

-CP

  The layoff parade is too great to ignore every day. So here’s one more item of melancholia in the newspaper trade. The Tracker received word yesterday from Raleigh News & Observer‘s Wade Rawlins that he’s signing off as of next week – the environmental reporter’s slot was among 30 newsroom jobs eliminated in the latest round of cuts. He’s been there 19 years, and in the business for 29. Less than a year ago, among his several appearances at this blogsite, The Tracker was following an adventurous story he filed from Toolik, Alaska. while on a fellowship with the Institute of Arctic Biology. Now he really is out in the cold – which he calls an opportunity to reassess. Another sample of the sturdy work he’s done for the paper and its readers is this on hemlock tree devastation and a tiny fly that might buzz to the rescue – with an update last month. The most recent of his bylines I can turn up is this tale filed last week, of layoffs and environmental hurdles for a local phosphate mine. He plans to try freelancing.

-CP

At more than a little expense and considerable hoopla, genetic laboratories around the world have for the last five years been working up “genome-wide association studies” that are intended to identify specific genetic markers for specific diseases. This ability to make that link was one of the promising ideas behind the mapping of the human genome, and it still is.  But now comes the New England Journal of Medicine with commentaries in the current issue that genetic researchers are not as far along this trail as many were expecting.

At the New York Times, Nicholas Wade, in Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases, seemed to have the story almost to himself. “The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait,” Wade writes. “The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.”

As two Harvard epidemiologists, Peter Kraft and David J. Hunter, put it in Genetic Risk Prediction — Are We There yet?, “a striking fact about these first findings is that they collectively explain only a very small proportion of the underlying genetic contribution of most studied diseases.”

So discouraged are some geneticists with the wider range of genetic variables, they are wondering if they are spending their research funds wisely.  The public outbreak of uncertainty may be especially hard on private companies who have been selling personal genomic profiles to individuals.

As Duke University geneticist David B. Goldstein, author of another commentary, Common Genetic Variation and Human Traits, told Wade:  “With only a few excpetions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics.  The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”

Grist for the mill:  New England Journal of Medicine

-JDC

Glaciers and ice sheets and the sea levels they modulate used to be seen as the slowest and least threatening of potential changes in climate — not because they don’t happen, but because they come and go at such a, well, glacial pace.  Scientists are not so sure about that anymore.

New evidence of fossil corals from an unlikely locale — canal walls at a new resort on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula near Cancun, Mexico — published in Nature Thursday suggests that the last ice age ended 121,000 years ago with a rapid spurt of ice melting and a catastrophic jump in sea level, on the order of 6-10 feet in 50 years or so.

The findings by geoscientist Paul Blanchon in Mexico and three German colleagues comes at a time when uncertainty about the melting rates of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is a hot research topic.  The story drew wide attention.

Among the stories:

In the New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin in Coral Fossils Suggest That Sea Level Can Rise Rapidly, sets up a give-and-take that was observed by several writers.  He quotes the authors’ unabashed assertion: “The potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability.” And then goes on to quote other researchers in the field who maintain that Blanchon and colleagues have not yet made a persuasive case.

At National Geographic News, Brian Handwerk took the doubters even more seriously in Fossil Corals Show Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise?, using knock-down quotes around “confirm” in describing “a controversial new study.” He quotes a scientist as saying the study is “interesting but not compelling” because the age estimates of the corals are not accurate enough.

On the other hand, at Time.com, Bryan Walsh writes in Coral Fossils Reveal Sea Levels Rising Fast that the new study “argues that our ice sheets may be far more vulnerable than we believe, and that it may be a matter of decades before cities like New York are turned into swampland.”

In the UK, writing for The Telegraph, Richard Alleyne in New warning over ‘catastrophic’ sea level rise, spun that idea to the max:  “Sea levels could rise by a ‘catastrophic’ 10 feet by the end of the century – putting millions of people at risk of flooding with coastal cities such as London, New York, Tokyo and Calcutta submerged, according to a new study.”  Oddly enough, the urban splash was illustrated with an image of a stranded polar bear.

-JDC

As the late Abe H. Weiler at the New York Times famously put it, “Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.”  Like other political interests whose influence waxes and wanes, environmentalists are discovering some potholes of painful contradiction in the new political landscape.

In the Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson describe such conflicts of values in Renewable Energy’s Environmental Partadox. The national drive to expand domestic energy supplies with new solar and wind power facilities is running headlong into another long-standing priority — the protection of wildlife and its habitat.

They focus on the proposed SunZia transmission line that would carry solar and wind-derived electrical power from central New Mexico to the cities of Arizona.  The problem is that the sandhill cranes and New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is in the way, right next to the proposed route of the 460-mile power line.

More than 200 wind power projects have been approved — many to test their suitability as power production sites — and another 200 are awaiting approval.

Some deft touches keep the story from sprawling aimlessly over the western landscape, such as the use of Ned Farquhar, former aide to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, to personify the conflict. They quote him: “Everybody in New Mexico loves the sandhill cranes…We also love our renewable energy. So we have to figure this out.”

He said that a month ago, they note, when he worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Now he is head of the Bureau of Land Management — “in charge of figuring it out.”

In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Jeffrey Ball took a more cosmic approach to the topic earlier this month, characterizing it as a conflict between local and globally oriented environmentalists.

-JDC

One wonders – had somebody taken a standard hothouse, heated it to projected global warming levels for late this century, and transplanted some pinyon trees within it to test their drought tolerance, would the results (dead trees!) have gotten much attention? Maybe. But as it was performed in the sensational-looking Biosphere 2 south of Tucson – that huge brainstorm by a billionaire that instead fell into scientific limbo – this could be why it caught the eye of several reporters. The news, from a University of Arizona team, is that when one combines the natural pattern of Southwestern drought with the temperatures that appear to be on the way, one of the region’s iconic tree species looks to be in serious trouble. Pinyon (or, better, piñon ) pines death rates shot well above the rates they show in their natural stands now. The results are in Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences. And, the researchers pointedly say, this is just the temperature impact. Bark beetles and fire will only make things worse. Maybe long term investors should buy shares in pine nut farms – the wild varieties are going to get scarcer.

Stories:

• Arizona Republic – Shaun McKinnon: Study: Temp rise hastens death of trees  ; Story’s fine, but hed invites a “duh…!” response. Check out the reader reactions. Lots of hooting over liberal scientists using tax dollar to declare the obvious.
• Tucson Citizen – Alan Fischer : UA: Drought-stricken pines may die five times faster as temps rise ; V. clear exp. of the procedure and its interpretation. And looks like the same demographic in Arizona dominates the responses to both papers’s enviro news stories.
• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: Warming could add to risk in drought ; You know – could not a single reporter have anticipated that this seems like something common sense could answer? : heat up a tree and it might die faster. So why not right in the lede say this sounds like an odd way to spend taxpayer money – but then explain “scientists who did it, however, say they did learn a great deal about how the future Arizona might look.” It won’t hold off the yahoos from hooting, but it provides context and reinforcement for readers who take their news seriously.
• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: The dire Fate of Forests in a Warmer World ; His lede provides immediate justification for the study, “It’s not easy to kill a full-grown tree – especially one like the piñon pine.” He also smartly starts off, first and before getting to the new work, by noting that recent droughts have already starting killing a higher share of the trees than did similarly dry stretches of decades past.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Warmer temperatures play big role in droughty (sic) tree die-offs ;  Looks like Pete had the jump on this story, but had to wait for it to clear embargo. He provides exensive context in previous research.
• Scientific American – David Biello: Global Warming May Leave U.S. Southwest Pining for Pinyons ; Again, and sensibly, puts the why before any details of the experiment’s what.
• Reno Gazette Journal – Jeff DeLong: Study shows climate change could kill Nevada state tree ; That’s a hed with locally pertinent punch.
• Albuquerque Journal – John Fleck: Global Warming Fingered in Tree Death ; This is a blog post. The Journal’s publisher is a stubborn pioneer: he CHARGES for on line news. Hope that saves the business. Here is the FULL STORY, which you can see by pushing Trial Subscription, waiting through the ad, and then clicking into the newspaper proper. He starts with the problem and the insight, then works into what the U of Ariz researchers did. Smart approach.

Grist for the Mill: U. Ariz. Press Release ;

AND FINALLY, in OTHER CONIFER HARDINESS NEWS (with thanks to, again today, Seth Borenstein) :

• Daily Express (UK) Will Stewart : Surgeons Find Fir Tree Growing in Man’s Lung ;  With a picture to prove it.
• The Sun (UK) David Willetts: Tree patient had fir-ight of his life ;

Hey, didn’t we just read about STEREO? It is the collective name of two identical satellites on route to a perfect vantage for watching solar storms erupt from two angles. Yes we did – Monday (post here). That’s when outlets picked up and ran news from NASA that the birds will soon pass close enough to two Lagrangian points to check for signs one of them once housed a planet – and explains how we got the Moon. Today, however, the two are back in the news for doing their primary job. They’ve imaged a solar outburst or Coronal Mass Ejection from their steadily-separating vantages (one ahead, the other behind the Earth’s position in its orbit).

STEREO does not, it appears, mean 3-D in the Hollywood movie sense. No special glasses required. But the distinct points of view will give solar storm and solar atmospheric physics specialists a much richer view of events. And, perhaps NASA’s graphics wizards can combine the data into 3-D plasma storms and neutral particle gales one could rotate, fly through virtually, etc.?

Stories:

• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Peter Spotts: Spacecraft sees solar storm in 3-D; it’s the blob! ; Nice hed (except that “spacecraft” ought to be treated as plural). Another nice touch is Spott’s explanation that this sort of thing is STEREO’s “day job.” As in when the sun is shining.Plus he really gets into how this pair works with another sat, called ACE, to precisely time and measure an oncoming storm’s fury ;
• Science News – Sid Perkins: MASSIVE SOLAR FLARES CAPTURED IN 3-D  ; Detailed explanation how the new data improve things. For one: if a coronal mass is headed straight at us, the sidelong view will reveal immediately how fast it’s going.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: NASA Sun probes watch over Earth ; The eruption was in December, and was aimed at Earth it says here. But it was a proof of principle – were it a stronger threat, it says  here, a warning could have gone out in time to put Earth-orbiting satellites into modes safer for storms of high energy solar particles.  Source provides a nice line about solar croissants.
• Xinhua – editor Yao : NASA spacecraft show three dimensional anatomy of solar storm ; Tracker seldom links to Xinhua’s science stories on overseas events. It’s no fun shooting ducks in a pond, but here’s a reason why. This is literally straight off the press release.
• National Geographic – Anne Minard: First 3-D Pictures of Solar Explosions Created ; The storm it just saw, during the Sun’s current rather weak phase, was just a ‘wussy’ little CME, she learns from a source.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release ;  STEREO observatories ;

Pic: Not the eruption, but the most recent pics. Unsure what the wavelength is – one guesses in the ultraviolet.