We've already considered one thing (other than climate change) which has the potential to affect the Arctic environment,
increasing UV from an 'ozone hole'. Another one of these potential 'things' is pollution, or more scientifically, chemicals and compounds where they're not supposed to be naturally. One things humans have always done is burn things, and the record of these activities is clear in the palaeo-archives, from the prehistoric burning of small wood fires, through large scale burning for clearing right to the modern widescale burning of almost anything and everything seen since the industrial revolution. What is more recent though is the widespread use of pesticides and the growth of heavy industry. We tend to see the Arctic regions as a wilderness, wild and untouched. However, many types of pollutants have been found across the Arctic circle.
In this and the next post, I won't attempt to try and fully describe the extent of Arctic pollution. There are just too many pollutants and studies to do that! Rather, I'm going to focus on a couple of papers which have some interesting findings relating to POPs and SCPs (I did warn you about the acronyms).
The
Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) was set up in 1991 as part of the inter-governmental '
Arctic Council'. It's website it full of reports, both scientific and for the press which are freely available and are
