191 



First of all, we're going to depart a little bit. Two of our guests 

 on the scientific panel have chosen to go later on in the day, and 

 that's our friend from Russia, Leonid Bolshov, and Dr. Vera Alex- 

 ander of the Institute of Marine Sciences of the University of Alas- 

 ka. 



I would introduce this p£inel now. Dr. Aaskar Aarkog, head of the 

 Ecology Section, Department of Environmental Sciences and Tech- 

 nology, at Riso National Laboratory in Denmark. Dr. Charles Hol- 

 lister of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dr. Robert 

 White, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska. Dr. Odd 

 Rogne, International Arctic Science Committee, Oslo, Norway. And 

 Dr. Glenn Shaw, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska. Is 

 there an order, gentlemen, or shall we start with the introductions? 



Mr. Garman. HoUister's first. 



Senator MURKOWSKI. HoUister's first. All right. We're ready for 

 you. Please proceed. 



STATEMENT OF DR. CHARLES HOLLISTER, WOODS HOLE 

 OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE 



Dr. HOLLISTER. Thank you, Senator. I have to admit that it's a 

 very brave person that's going to bring together the kinds of indi- 

 viduals that we have here; the environmental community and all 

 the government sectors and private sectors that are involved in 

 this debate, and I just want to congratulate the Senator on the 

 foresight. 



Thirty years ago last night I finished the first assent of the 

 southeast side of Mount McKinley, first and only time anybod/s 

 been dumb enough to go up that side of that big mountain. And 

 that was just 30 years ago. And now I'm back in a completely dif- 

 ferent uniform. 



Why am I here? Well, Woods Hall Oceanographic Institution has 

 done a lot of things in the ocean, around the world, including using 

 robots to go down the grand staircase of the Titanic to look inside 

 the ballroom, take a look at the remaining art work, and they've 

 got us on the front cover of Time Magazine, but that's not what we 

 do for a living. What we do is use these robots and our experts and 

 scientists to figure out what's going on in the ocean and how to 

 make it useful for you all. 



The other thing we've been doing vis-a-vis the problem we're 

 talking about today is that we've been studying the waters coming 

 out of the Arctic for nearly 30 years while we look at the radio- 

 active material that has been coming down the pipes of the reproc- 

 essing plants of Wind Scale, nuclear reprocessing plant on the 

 shores of Great Britain, and recently renamed Sellafield, it's the 

 same place, however. And we have noticed that most of the radio- 

 active material going into the Arctic and coming out of the Arctic 

 originates from those reprocessing plants. 



However, we have seen interesting little spikes of cobalt-60 com- 

 ing down the East Greenland current that was hard to explain 

 using the outfall scenario. But we shrugged it off, thinking it had 

 to be from fallout. We noticed a little blip of cesium about 4,000 

 feet below the North Pole and some of this information comes from 

 our colleagues from Denmark, so I'm putting it sort of in a bouilla- 

 baisse here for you very quickly, which we couldn't explain very 



