concentrated in the flow of high-purity nitrogen gas to 1 ml and 

 subjected to the chromatography analysis. The accuracy of this 

 method was about 50%; therefore, the observed results should 

 be interpreted only qualitatively. 



The samples of the marine biota were first separated from 

 their shells (crabs, bivalves, urchins, etc.) and the soft tissues 

 ground into a homogeneous mass, defatted with acetone, and 

 subjected to preliminary processing similar to the analysis of 

 bottom sediments. Simultaneously, separate subsamples were 

 weighed for the determination of dry weight and fat content. 

 Recoveries in these experiments were in the 93-97% range. 



The suspended materials were secured by filtering large 

 water volumes (up to 300 1) through 0.45 |a m pore diameter 

 membrane filters, which were previously cleaned with organic 

 solvents. The chlorinated compounds were extracted from the 

 suspended materials on these filters by extracting them with 



n-hexane in Soxhlet concentrators over 4-h periods ( 10 cycles 

 per hour); thereafter, they were analyzed similarly to the 

 seawater samples. 



Results and Discussions 



Table 1 presents the data on the concentration of chlorinated 

 hydrocarbons in water of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. The 

 comparative analysis of these findings shows the peculiar 

 distribution of each of the studied xenobiotics. The most 

 interesting results are for the hexachlorocyclohexanes. Thus, 

 it is found that their concentration in water samples exceeds by 

 approximately 10 times the concentration of other identified 

 chloroorganic hydrocarbons such as PCB's and DDT's. These 

 rather high concentrations of HCH isomers (up to 5 ng/1) with 

 their low concentration in the atmospheric air samples 



TABLE 1 



The concentration of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the seawater. 



Chlorinated hydrocarbon concentration (ng/1) 



280 



