Persistent Organic Pollutants and Heavy Metals (Including Mercury) - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 178

stances from inventories stored in the oceans, soils, sediments and vegetation. In wildlife,
the legacy POPs are generally following decreasing trends throughout the Arctic, where
data are available in terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. However, in some areas
and for some species, it has so far been difficult to detect trends (such as HCH in marine
mammals).
We are about to dive into some heavy text, so perhaps it is time to catch our breath
with a little historical digression. Why is the air-monitoring site at Ny-Ålesund on Sval-
bard called Zeppelin? One of the foothills behind Ny-Ålesund is called Zeppelin Mountain.
In 1926, a Zeppelin airship called the Norge left Ny-Ålesund with the famous Norwegian
explorer Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile (an Italian explorer) on board. The Norge
required a tall mooring mast that still stands at Ny-Ålesund. Corrosion is a slow process in
the Arctic and the mast today looks as if it were constructed just a few years ago. Their aim
was to land at the North Pole. However, when they arrived, the weather was so poor that
they had to keep going until they landed two days later at Teller in Alaska. In 1928, Nobile
again set out for the North Pole in another airship called the Italia but this time without
Amundsen. The Italia crashed on the return trip, suffering loss of life, but Nobile survived
and was eventually rescued. Tragically, Amundsen lost his life in a plane accident during
the search and rescue.
In the next few paragraphs, we will start to encounter some chemicals with names that
can be quite intimidating if you have not studied organic chemistry. An organic chemist
names a substance according to its constituent parts. Numbers in the name tell you how
many times a similar component may be involved in the complete molecule and where all
the bits and pieces may be attached to each other. It is rather as if you were describing how
to build something with a child's construction toy. I have used these names because we will
be talking about some specific substances, but it is not important that you try to remember
or to pronounce any of them. All you need to do is appreciate how ubiquitous POPs have
become in our everyday lives, how they have been accumulating in the Arctic ecosystem,
even though they may have had little use in the Arctic and how there are far more POPs in
the world than listed in the new control agreements.