SUNS  4303 Friday 16 October 1998


ENVIRONMENT: GLOBAL WARMING ENDANGERS ARCTIC

Ottawa, Oct 14 (IPS/Mark Bourrie) -- New evironmental studies in the high arctic show that global warming and pollution is increasing in the polar region above Canada at a much faster rate
than even the most pessimistic predictions of a decade ago. The damage to the arctic not only is poisoning the people who live there, it also poses a threat to the climate and health of people
in the rest of the planet, say research scientists.

For the past year, a team of 160 scientists has been living on the ice of the Arctic Ocean, about 500 kilometres from the North Pole. Their headquarters has been aboard the Canadian icebreaker Des
Groseilliers, which has been converted into a floating laboratory.

Biologist Harold Welch, a researcher on the team, said a comparison with studies done 30 years ago shows a major melting of the polar ice cap.

"With climate warming, we get a thinning of the arctic ice pack and more open water, and a longer summer with less snow cover, which allows more light to come in," Welch said in a telephone interview. "It's pretty much the greenhouse effect, there's no doubt about it, and it's going to create profound climate change...we're seeing that now."

The Earth has been through many warming and cooling trends, but Welch says this century's warming of the arctic does not appear to be part of that historic cycle. He said the warming has been keeping pace to the increase in human population and the rise of industry.

"It is very sudden, but it is completely as expected, according to our carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas scenario," Welch said.

Scientists reported that the ice pack has become so thin that the research camp was nearly was lost several times when the ice around it split apart. The ice also drifted much farther than expected,
taking the camp close to Russian territorial waters.

As they conducted their experiments, the scientists realised man's damage to the arctic is worse than anyone suspected.

"A couple of times, we saw haze in the atmosphere and the sun appearing as a red ball because of forest fires and other fires in Asia. But much more important, we see contaminants, pollution, that
comes from Eurasia, primarily," Welch said.

A year ago, snow that fell at the camp contained two nanograms of mercury per litre of water, which is normal for precipitation in the northern hemisphere. Welch said the amount of mercury has
steadily increased, and reached 50 nanograms in May - the last month for which complete data is available.

The scientists also measured increasing levels of contaminants like DDT and PCBs. Welch says the climate of the planet, and the behaviour of the chemicals, conspire to make the arctic a 'sink'
for agricultural and industrial chemicals.

"Take the pesticide lindane, which evaporates easily. It's used quite often in India and China, but it's banned in North America. You pour the stuff on the soil at 30 degrees and it evaporates off. And it condenses somewhere where it's cold. You can just see what happens.

"It 'grasshoppers' its way up, and ends up in the arctic." Welch said.

"In the arctic, food chains are very long. Polar bears eat seals, which eat cod, which eat zooplankton, which eat phytoplankton, and what you get is a million-fold concentration of these chemicals. Then if you're a human, you're also picking this up... when you nurse your baby, it goes out with the fat and affects your child's development. This is a major problem globally, but especially in the Canadian arctic."

Pollution is the other great problem and last month officials from the eight countries that border the polar region met in the small town of Iqaluit, capital of Canada's Eastern Arctic territory, Nunavut, to deal with the issue.

Canada, Denmark-Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States are members of the council - and also the creators of much of the pollution in the Arctic.

On the North American side of the Arctic Ocean, military installations, many of them abandoned early warning system radar stations, are polluting land and water.

On the European and Asian side, pesticide residues and other pollutants are spilling into the Arctic Ocean from north-flowing Russian and Siberian rivers. Decaying Russian nuclear submarine
installations on the White Sea have polluted the ocean with nuclear waste, including entire reactor cores from scrapped ships, say environmental groups.

The Canadian government is starting to do its share by cleaning up 15 PCB-contaminated Distant Early Warning (DEW) stations in the Nunavut territory. Six similar radar stations in the western Arctic have already been disposed of under an agreement signed with aboriginal peoples in 1996.
  
Jane Stewart, Canada's northern affairs minister, says it will be difficult to end the polluting of the Arctic.

"The strategies of solution are something that will come with time. These first couple of years, we've been focussing on the collection of data, so that we have a base line to work from in certain areas
of contamination in all of the eight countries. That will be, part of the continuing agenda, to understand that data, and, as appropriate, build risk assessment models to deal with that, " she
says.

But Canadian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been quick to take up the issue of Arctic pollution.

Jim Fulton, executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation, an organisation that funds environmental research, says "climate change is here, it's real, it's happening" and it's directly
attributable to the combustion of fossil fuels. There also is a direct connection between air pollution and climate change."

Scientist John Last, co-author of a new Suzuki Foundation report on the effects of air pollution, said the arctic is being poisoned mainly by air pollution from industrialised countries. Pollutants, combined with climate change, may destroy the arctic, he says.

"Global warming isn't something that's going to happen in the future. It's happening now. This year has been the hottest since we began keeping systematic records in the 1860s. And there's fairly
good indirect evidence that it's the hottest year for six or seven hundred years," he says "There is an increasing body of hard scientific evidence that links accumulating greenhouse gasses in the upper atmosphere with the climate change that we are experiencing now."

Graham Chance, a scientist who has studied the effects of air pollution on the ecology of Canada, agrees that the arctic food chain creates a dangerous build-up of toxic chemicals in the animals that northern people eat.
  
"The fact that it's in significant quantities in breast milk in some Arctic communities is a matter of concern. Yet we look at the arctic as some kind of pristine environment. It's our abuse of what
we've used in the industrialised countries that is creating these problems, he says."

Despite the growing body of scientific evidence pointing to an ecological crisis in the arctic, governments haven't come up with a clean-up plan. Stewart says Russia has pledged to try to cut down emissions into the arctic but is short of finances and none of the other seven members of the Arctic Council have promised financial aid.