THE Arctic is supposed to be one of the most pristine environments on Earth. Yet the region contains the earliest evidence of human pollution of lakes and ponds found in North America.
The culprits were Inuit whalers who migrated to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland from Alaska about 1000 years ago. These hunters were remarkably efficient, using more than 60 per cent of the animals鈥� bodies, including using the bones as frames for houses covered with seal skin. But the remaining waste polluted freshwater ecosystems in the region.
Palaeoecologist John Smol of Queen鈥檚 University in Kingston, Ontario, and his colleagues took sediment cores from a wide, shallow pond near an Inuit site on the south-eastern part of Somerset Island in northern Nunavut. They reveal that the composition of algae and moss changed when the Inuit arrived 800 years ago, and changed again after the Inuit abandoned the site about 400 years ago.
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Whale leftovers leached nutrients into the soil and nearby water, changing its ecology, say the researchers. Furthermore, nitrogen and phosphorus levels in the pond remain higher than in other ponds in the area, due to the ongoing decay of remaining whale bones (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0307570100).