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STATEMENT OF DR GLENN SHAW, GEOPHYSICAL INSTITUTE, 



UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA 



Dr. Shaw. Thank you, Senator Murkowski. It's indeed a pleas- 

 ure. The last time I was on this stage I was playing as a beginning 

 violin player with the youth symphony and this is much easier, I 

 can assure you. 



My testimony is primarily directed today at two topics: the first 

 one is, as everyone might guess, the topic of Arctic haze, which is 

 the propensity of the Arctic regions, the Polar regions in general, 

 to build up pollution. And the second thing that I want to talk 

 about is some recommendations for general strategy regarding the 

 topics that we're discussing at the hearing today. 



Within the numerous mobile beltways on the planet, even per- 

 haps including the Uquid core of the earth, the floating planets, the 

 most mobile medium by far, of course, is the atmosphere. And so 

 in the event of a release of material that enters overtly or covertly 

 perhaps by accident into the atmosphere, of course it's well known 

 that the atmosphere has the characteristics that it transports ma- 

 terial from one point on the planet to another point on the planet. 



Now, for the most part, although this is recognized, it is not 

 taken into account because materials in the atmosphere generally 

 remain in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. So, for example, 

 if you're living in the city and there is pollution in that city, it gen- 

 erally doesn't reach the next city over. It falls out of the air by the 

 time transport occurs. In the Arctic what our research that was 

 started 20 years ago and has been subsequently enhanced by many 

 other groups has shown is that the output tap is closed, if you will, 

 for the Arctic basin in general. That means that the Arctic atmos- 

 phere can be conceptualized as a bathtub with the output tap 

 closed. The situation is somewhat similar to that occurring in the 

 Los Angeles basin, except in this case it's a basin roughly the size 

 of the continent of Africa. Anyone who has lived in Fairbanks has 

 experienced the phenomenon of ice fog. If you're so fortunate as to 

 not have to spend your winters in Fairbanks, you caii go into the 

 supermarket and observe that the cold air in freezers is dense and 

 remains in the freezers, just sloshes around, even in Phoenix Ari- 

 zona on a hot day. This is roughly what happens in the Arctic. 



I have three view graphs that tend to conceptualize this general 

 paradigm of the Arctic being a stagnant pond. They aren't showing 

 too well, but I think you can see that the first view graph is mak- 

 ing the point that there's two ways to fill up a beaker with fluid. 

 One, of course, is to pour lots of fluid in, that's the normal pollution 

 situation that we tend to think of here in the mid latitudes. But 

 the other way that's just as effective is the stagnant pond analogy, 

 the Los Angeles basin analogy, if you will, where a small amount 

 of materi£d into such an air mass will build up into rather large 

 pollution values. 



The Arctic atmosphere in general, as far as that goes, the Ant- 

 arctic polar atmospheres on planets have this general property that 

 the output plug is not working. As a result of this, many of the 

 models, much of the knowledge, a great deal of the chemistry that 

 has been compiled so far by agencies and by scientists regarding 

 the transfer and fate of air pollutants, does not apply to the Arctic. 

 And so one of our tasks is to invent new knowledge. 



