{"id":60345,"date":"2012-09-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-oceanographer-to-examine-why-chemical-pollutants-persist-in-arctic\/"},"modified":"2012-09-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T00:00:00","slug":"uri-oceanographer-to-examine-why-chemical-pollutants-persist-in-arctic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2012\/09\/uri-oceanographer-to-examine-why-chemical-pollutants-persist-in-arctic\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer to examine why chemical pollutants persist in Arctic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 September 12, 2012 \u2013 Pollutants from throughout the Northern Hemisphere often make their way through the air and water to the Arctic, where they can persist for decades and affect the health of the people and wildlife that live there. Now a 溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer is collaborating with scientists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to better understand how and why various kinds of pollutants persist in the environment.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe Arctic is a fascinating place,\u201d said Rainer Lohmann, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the Graduate School of Oceanography. \u201cIt\u2019s cold, so things degrade much slower. It\u2019s in the Northern Hemisphere where more people live and where there are more pollutants. And its food web structure is long, so pollutants accumulate up the food chain into large marine mammals that people care about.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThanks to a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Lohmann and his colleagues will study how older industrial pollutants like PCBs and DDT fare in the Arctic compared with what he calls \u201cemerging contaminants.\u201d The focus will be on new fluorinated compounds that have been used in non-stick pans, no-stain carpets and water repellent outdoor apparel.<\/p>\n


\n\tLohmann has collected water samples from the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska, Europe and Russia and deployed sampling devices east of Greenland and elsewhere that can detect the levels of various contaminants. His Harvard and MIT colleagues are creating atmospheric and ocean models that will track the transport of the pollutants.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThere are a lot of big questions that we hope to answer,\u201d Lohmann said. \u201cFor instance, why are PCBs still around in such abundance 40 years after they were banned? As for the newer compounds, some of them have been banned as well, but it is unclear whether there is any evidence that the ban has had an effect.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWorking with three graduate students who will rotate among the three research institutions, the science team hopes to reproduce the current state of Arctic contamination and predict what will happen to the contaminants in the future.<\/p>\n


\n\tThe uncertain effects of global warming will make their job particularly difficult.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIf there is a lot less sea ice up there, that means there could be a greater movement of marine contaminants into the atmosphere, which could help clean the ocean,\u201d explained Lohmann. \u201cBut less ice also means more phytoplankton blooms, which could absorb more pollutants from the air into the water.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tFor marine mammals, the changing environmental conditions may mobilize their lipid reserves where pollutants are stored, making things even worse for already stressed animals.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI\u2019m afraid there are no good news scenarios for the polar bear,\u201d Lohmann said.<\/p>\n


\nPictured above

\nScientists deploy instruments to measure pollutants in the Arctic Ocean.

\nPhoto submitted by professor, Rainer Lohmann<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 September 12, 2012 \u2013 Pollutants from throughout the Northern Hemisphere often make their way through the air and water to the Arctic, where they can persist for decades and affect the health of the people and wildlife that live there. Now a 溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer is collaborating with scientists at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60347,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}