Thank you for your question.
To clarify, I am not actively doing research now. I'm reporting the greatest spill that was ever done experimentally and some of the results from the 1970s. There is work being done now in Canada, but it's actually at a lower level than what was done for the Beaufort Sea work.
I do believe there should be a moratorium, because if you look at the oil leasing that has gone on in the Beaufort Sea, it certainly includes and extends out into the moving pack ice. I believe drilling in that area would be extremely risky. I don't agree, though, that the moratorium should include the landfast ice, where drilling has been done safely for many years. There are techniques to drill safely in that region, but I don't believe it would be safe, or worth risking what could potentially be quite catastrophic should there be a blowout in the moving-ice gyre, in the Beaufort Sea.
I agree very much with one of the other intervenors at the committee here, in terms of the process. But there are programs going on now in Norway. I think they are bragging about the fact that they're spending $10 million. We spent something like $50 million in this program in the seventies, in present-day dollars, so it was a very large program. It did not continue after about 1978, unfortunately, although Bedford Institute does have an arctic oil program of research. They're having great difficulty even being able to spill a few barrels of oil. We spilled a lot of oil in our tests, and probably something similar should be done, and continued. I believe that's a very important process to understand the oil-ice regime before we can assess the risk.