Yes, thank you.
I've been involved now in oil sands research for a few years, working closely with Environment Canada, and this stemmed to some extent from the time when I was on the panel where we realized there were some issues with the monitoring. One of the biggest problems we have in environmental work is basically the lack of monitoring, and the only way we can get back in time to make up for missed monitoring opportunities is some of the work that I do with Environment Canada. We work on lake sediments and we track changes over time. We can go back hundreds, even thousands, of years. One of the biggest things we have to worry about is what the baseline is. What is natural?
Just to summarize some of this work we've done, we were able to show that in fact PAHs in this case, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are in fact increasing in the oil sands—they seem to be going in lock-step with the oil sands operation—and are actually being transported by air farther than I think most people suspected. In our first paper we published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, at least one of our lakes was 90 kilometres away and we could see a record.
That is one aspect of it. We're trying to make up for missed monitoring opportunities. This is only one of the many contaminants that are out there. I spoke earlier of this soup of contaminants. In some ways, this is a more optimistic viewpoint. I think we're trying to push this information forward to show that there are actually other costs or other environmental costs that may not be accounted for, and we came to the story late because this work has all been happening in the last few years. I am a little more optimistic now with the amount of research and the peer-reviewed publications coming out. I think there's certainly a scientific base coming forward for what we can do in that part of the world.