1 September, 1997

We still didn't get our cameras and hydrophone into the water but Fiona assured us that our turn will happen tomorrow morning. Nick has tested all our equipment and it seems to be in good working order. We realize that what works on the deck may behave much differently when lowered 1000 feet below the surface. I've included a picture of a very dejected Bill Strachan. He is here to study contaminants in the surface water. In order to do his experiments he has to pump several cubic meters of water to a centrifuge on deck. When his equipment was lowered into the water the pump wouldn't work. Even though the ship is over 100 meters long, the captain will only allow one experiment to be in the water at a given time. This means each group is only allotted a certain amount of time. Bill may have to wait several more days before he gets another chance to get his pump over the side. Today we've sampled near Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world. This might be the last place that anthropogenic pollutants would be expected, however, chemicals such as PCB's mercury, and toxaphene tend to volatilized under warm conditions and deposited under cold conditions. The result on a global scale is for these compounds to migrate toward the earth's poles. This is an illustration of how the actions of people from one place on the planet can affect regions far from the original source.