Northern Ocean Inventories of Radionuclide Contamination: GIS Efforts to Determine the Past and Present State of the Environment in and Adjacent to the Arctic

• Published in: Marine pollution bulletin 2000-10, Vol.40 (10), p.853-868
• Main Authors: Crane, Kathleen, Galasso, Jennifer, Brown, Clare, Cherkashov, Georgy, Ivanov, Gennady, Vanstain, Boris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Russia
• ISSN: 0025-326X; 1879-3363
• DOI: 10.1016/S0025-326X(00)00084-9

Until recently, the Arctic has been thought of as remote and pristine, far from the environmental problems associated with industrial and agricultural development of lower latitudes. The cold war cloaked many activities in the region under a curtain of secrecy and for most of the world, the Arctic remained largely out of sight and out of mind. Information released in 1992 on deliberate dumping of nuclear materials (including 16 nuclear reactors, six of them with fuel rods intact and over 10 000 containers of lower-level radioactive waste) in shallow Siberian-Arctic Seas (Zolotkov, 1991; Handler, 1992, 1993; Bellona, 1992; Yablokov et al., 1993) elicited a strong response among the countries ringing the Arctic. As the need for rapid response to a problem which was very poorly understood, it became imperative to compile all known data about the state of radionuclide contamination in the Arctic Ocean, its peripheral seas and oceans, in the sediment below and in the riverine systems that drained into the Arctic. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC was tasked with the role of developing a Geographic Information System to address the radionuclide contamination issue and to create a data base of information collected from ONR funded expeditions in 1993, 1994 and 1995 (Project ANWAP (Arctic nuclear waste assessment program)) (Crane, 1997). This effort expanded to include heavy metal and organochlorine contamination data resulting in the Arctic Environmental Atlas (Crane and Galasso, 1999), 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 (Crane and VNIIOkeangeologia, 2000) was produced in St. Petersburg, Russia via funding from the World Wildlife Fund, US.