Certainly we've been looking at the impacts of PAHs, not only in northern Alberta but also in the Slave River delta and the Northwest Territories, up the Mackenzie River to the Mackenzie River delta and the Mackenzie communities, so we are looking. Also, I have done a lot of work in Hamilton Harbour on the double-crested cormorants. With the coal in the water there, there are some issues.
How does it compare? We find that PAHs follow often latitudinal gradients similar to mercury, so because it binds to particulate matter coming out of smokestacks, there's a capacity for long-range transport that gets deposited mostly on those northern communities.
Over the last 25 years, PAHs dominate the sum of all contaminants found in Arctic biota. We're finding that in animals and plants in the Arctic, PAHs make up the majority of those compounds found in those wildlife species.