KOCHI: The North and South Poles have always been an attraction for not only the adventurous but also those pursuing scientific research. It might come as a surprise to Keralites that we Malayalees have made our presence known in the harsh frozen terrain of the Arctic too! And how?
The four-member Indian Arctic expedition team has a researcher from Mahatma Gandhi University’s School of Environmental Sciences. The team is on a one-month expedition which is India’s first winter expedition to the icy region.
“Our school has been an active partner in the Indian Arctic expeditions since 2013 with wholehearted support from the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR), Goa, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India,” said Dr Baiju K R, professor and Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences. Dr Baiju is taking part in India’s first winter expedition – for the project titled “Long Term Environmental Monitoring of Arctic Fjords, Svalbard - Perfluorinated Compounds in the Arctic Environment”.
According to him, the School of Environmental Sciences has been conducting extensive research on the Arctic environment. “The research has been looking into the occurrence of mercury, other metals and emerging contaminants such as dioxin and perfluorinated compounds in different Arctic fjord and terrestrial matrices,” he said. But isn’t the Arctic cleaner than the heavily inhabited tropical areas?
“Yes, it’s thought that Arctic locations are cleaner than heavily inhabited tropical areas. As a result, everyone is closely monitoring the pollution-related problems in the region. Research on the fate of concentrated metals that enter the biosphere is scarce. It will likely be released back into the atmosphere or adjacent lakes, rivers, and straits, depending on how much the temperature rises. They might even make it into the food chain, which would cause significant environmental problems,” he added. The research team from MGU studies such changes in the Arctic along with the fate and transport of selected emerging contaminants.
Explaining more about the perfluorooctanoic acid in the sediment matrices of Arctic fjords, Dr Baiju said, “Poly and perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) are immuno and neurological toxins. It is persistent and bioaccumulative in nature. More number of studies reported the presence of PFAS in the different environmental matrices like air, seawater, fresh water, soil, sediment, snow and biota of the Arctic region.”
But how did that get in here? Dr Baiju said, “The important transport system for PFCs into the Arctic is long-range air transport and marine aerosols-mediated transport. Also, the role of local sources for PFCs in the Arctic environment, such as firefighting testing stations and landfill leachate in Svalbard, has been revealed recently.”