Scientists of the European Joint Research Centre (JRC) have developed and validated a method for the determination of mercury in seawater.
This method was designed to fulfil the needs for process control during the production of a new seawater certified reference material, currently under development at the JRC-Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM).
The in-house validation demonstrated that this method is also able to fulfil requirements for measuring samples with concentrations of mercury close to the environmental quality standard (EQS) as defined in the European Union's Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/EC and listed in Directive 2013/39/EU. Therefore, the method can serve two goals:
- to be used to monitor the production of a candidate certified seawater reference material, and
- to be used as routine method by control laboratories responsible for the chemical monitoring under the WFD.
