Northern Ocean Inventories of Organochlorine and Heavy Metal Contamination

In 1993, The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC was tasked with the role of developing a Geographic Information System to address the contamination in the greater Arctic environment and to create a data base of information collected from ONR-funded expeditions in 1993-1995 (Project Arctic Nuclear Waste Assessment Program (ANWAP)). This effort expanded to include heavy metal and organochlorine contamination data resulting in the Arctic Environmental Atlas, which was published in 1999 by the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Research Laboratory and Hunter College, CUNY. In 2000, an updated and translated (Russian) version of this atlas was produced in St. Petersburg, Russia via funding from the World Wildlife Fund. Prior to this effort, the first author worked with the Environmental Defense Fund, Washington DC to tabulate the distribution of contamination in the water, sediments and biota of the Arctic region. Data from these efforts were compiled for the years of 1950-1997 from all of the oceans of the northern hemisphere. Sediment contamination data were compiled for the years of 1960-1997. The data presented in the Arctic Environmental Atlas were taken from published scientific journals, books, and technical reports or, in some cases, from reports in press. They were subjected to internal institutional and/or external peer review. The authors used peer-reviewed data to ensure that the quality of data from different laboratories and countries was comparable. Contamination measurements on samples collected between 1990 and 1998 during the ANWAP expeditions or funded by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) were routinely compared from laboratory to laboratory and are, therefore, the most reliable data.