Radio Script
1998

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Top of the World Pollution
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STORY: High in the Arctic, hundreds of miles north of Alaska--almost but not quite near the north pole--you'd expect to see a stark white landscape set against a brilliant blue sky. But instead, a layer of soot hangs in the air.

Harold "Buster" Welch is a research scientist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Welch is among some 50 scientists studying the Arctic for a full year aboard an icebreaker high in the frozen Arctic Ocean. Though most of the scientists are focused on learning how the Arctic climate works, Welch is measuring the amount of pollution in the ocean and in the air.

WELCH: "The air sample I just took was very dark gray. It was clean in January, but now it's dark gray, indicating that there's some kind of haze forming. This gray is probably formed from soot particles that come from coal burning in Eurasia.

Scientists call this gray layer "Arctic Haze." Wind currents carry the soot from coal burning plants and factories in Russia and eastern Europe into the Arctic. But along with soot, winds carry contaminants like mercury and lead into the far north. Buster Welch is trying to learn just how much pollution has made its way north.

WELCH: "We're measuring the contaminants in the snow, and in the melt ponds in the springtime, how much runs into the water. And every two months I sample the water column for pollutants by putting pumps that filter the materials in the water. We capture the zooplankton and analyze those as well. So it's quite comprehensive."

And frightening. Welch says he is finding contaminants like DDT, toxophene and PCBs in the high Arctic food chain. He says many of those chemicals make their way north on air currents, and are deposited into the Arctic within rain and snow. From there, the pollutants are incorporated into plants and then accumulate up the food chain.

WELCH: "The upper 200 meters of the Arctic Ocean is the biggest reservoir I think in the world for these materials. You have to understand that these pesticides evaporate easily. So if you spray them on a field in India for example, they evaporate quickly and are transported by the atmosphere to the pole. Just the way you breathe on a cold window, they condense when it is cold. That's one of the ways they grasshopper their way into the Arctic Ocean. And at each trophic level the pollutants are concentrated tenfold. So it's not hard to understand why a polar bear may have a hundred thousand times more concentration of a pesticide than the plants.

Eventually, the effect of pollution in the Arctic will be felt by people. Health officials in Canada have at times had to warn indigenous peoples against eating some species of marine mammals that may have high concentrations of contaminants stored in their livers and other organs.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Robert Hannon reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.