Polar bears in remote north have high levels of toxic pollutants

By Elizabeth Haggarty, Toronto Star
Dec 10 2010 With its pristine-looking, snow-covered flats and mirror-like oceans that come with frigid temperatures and limited human exposure, the Arctic looks as clean as it could get, but it’s not — nature’s northern refuge is toxic. In fact, the 2500 polar bears that roam Norway’s remote Svalbard have some of the highest levels of toxic organic pollutants of any animal on the planet, professor Bjørn Munro Jenssen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found in his research. “These contaminants are bio-accumulated and bio-magnified up the food chain,” said Jenssen in an interview with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “So the higher you are in the food chain, the higher are the contaminants.” And the contamination doesn’t stop at polar bears, according to The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program’s (AMAP) annual Arctic pollution report, AMAP Assessment 2009 – Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in the Arctic. Arctic foxes, mink, three species of whales, sledge dogs, Arctic sea birds and humans could be affected by high pollution levels. Although mostly devoid of humans, the Arctic bears the brunt of much of our pollution, with industrial chemicals from Western Europe, North American and Asia swept into the region by air and ocean currents. For the report, researchers examined Arctic data collected between 1997 and 2002 from research stations in Canada (Alert), Finland (Pallas), Iceland (Storhofdi) and Norway (Zeppelin). And they found that while the amounts of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) such as PCBs, DDTs and toxaphene were declining, their effects on northern wildlife were not. “Concentrations of POPs in some wildlife are still high enough to affect the health of several groups of animals, especially top predators in the marine food web,” the report concluded. …