Arctic Sentinels 英文参考文献.docVIP

Feature Arctic Sentinels Global mercury emissions have stabilized over the past decade, yet levels in Arctic marine mammals have risen by an order of magnitude. Scientists struggle to explain why. Hannah Hoag O n a cloud-covered morning in April, Feiyue Wang trudges down the gangway of the Canadian research icebreaker CCGSAmundsen and joins three graduate students and a rifle-toting research technician on the ice below. They set out on snowmobiles across the snow-covered slab of ice adrift in the Beaufort Sea and stop at an untouched patch of the ice floe. They unload coolers, thermoses, a generator, and a variety of electric tools, as the hems of their jackets whip about in the wind. It’s –15 degrees Celsius, and the winds are gusting to 30 knots. The technician strolls along the edge of the field site with the rifle slung over her shoulder and scans the horizon for polar bears. For most of the group, it’s their first chance to be “on the ice” since they arrived. They’ve endured a full day of travel and another of safety drills and lab cleaning—Michel Gosselin, the chief scientist for this leg of the expedition, has made it clear that although their work is important, no science would be done until the labs are straightened up and bench top materials secured in case the ship had to suddenly dislodge from the ice floe. Samples of algae, zooplankton, water, and mud have piled up in the laboratories, which are passed on from one group to the next while theAmundsen is at sea. Despite the harsh conditions, the team works for hours without a break. They extract four-foot-long (~1.25-meter- long) ice cores from the floe and scoop up surface snow and seawater (see Figure 1). They will later analyze the samples in the onboard laboratories (see Box 1) to study the presence of mercury and other contaminants, tracing their paths from terrestrial and atmospheric sources to ocean waters and, ultimately, to marine mammals. Wang, an environmental chemist from the University of