Persistent Organic Pollutants and Heavy Metals (Including Mercury) - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 133

in circumpolar monitoring emerging under Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme
(AMAP). It was this combination of effort by scientists from around the entire circumpolar
Arctic that enabled the conversion of the working hypothesis into an accepted concept.
While we were beginning to focus on the conspiracy of the airborne pathway with
the power of biomagnification in Arctic Canada, research programmes organised under the
OsloandParisconventionsandbytheHelsinkiConventionhaddecidedthatcontamination
levels of organochlorines measured in the North and Baltic seas could only be explained
if there was a significant atmospheric pathway as well as river discharge and direct dis-
charge into the ocean. At that time, these seas were facing a dramatic rise in mortality of
seals caused by distemper (morbillivirus). However, the severity of the epidemic seemed
to be associated with PCB levels and immunodeficiency in the seal populations. Seals in
waters with much lower PCB concentrations off western Ireland and Scotland were far less
impacted by the infection. Meanwhile, in Canada and the United States, scientists working
on the rehabilitation of the Great Lakes, which had suffered years of abuse from chemic-
al dumping, found that even when levels of pollution input were drastically reduced, the
pollutant levels in the lakes failed to fall at the expected rates. There had to be another or-
ganochlorine source for the lakes, and of course, it soon revealed itself to be atmospheric
transport. Monitoring in these different regions was well ahead of Canadian efforts in the
Arctic, but as yet, Europe had not paid a great deal of attention to its far north. The emer-
ging realization of the role of long-range atmospheric transport of these substances raised
serious implications.
The startling lesson being learned was that for substances with the characteristics of
organochlorines and mercury, you do not have the ability to control the quality of your loc-
al or regional environment. Instead, you are at the mercy of emissions far away.
By mid-1990, an evaluation of all the information on Arctic contaminants we could
findwascompleted.Itwaseventuallypublishedin1992asfivepapersinasingleeditionof
thejournal Science of the Total Environment ,volume122(1-2).Thepaperwhichreviewed
how these substances were reaching the Arctic, was quite noncommittal about whether the
atmospheric, marine or freshwater pathway dominated. However, in the “Arctic Marine