532 



on these bottom organisms. The bottom organisms accumulate any- 

 thing that's coming into that water, and therefore it's getting into 

 the walrus. This could be a key to why we're having a problem 

 with our walrus contamination right now. Obviously a very, very 

 important problem. 



We can't be sure that the pollutants and their effects will be con- 

 fined to the Arctic even, because so many of the animals and birds 

 in the Arctic are migratory, especially the birds. They migrate long 

 distances into the northern temperate latitudes. So we clearly have 

 a global problem here in this whole pollution. Anything you put in 

 the sea, of course, is automatically a global problem because the 

 sea is one thing that touches all our lands, all our continents at 

 least. So, you're influencing an environment which embraces the 

 entire planet. And international cooperation is really the key to ad- 

 dressing the problems. 



Now as several people on this panel have already mentioned, the 

 University has established very close relationships with a number 

 of circumpolar entities and has a tradition of working together with 

 these to address problems. For example, our major Bering Sea re- 

 search which was primarily two major products, Probes and Ishtar, 

 both of which really helped us understand the Bering Sea eco- 

 system more thoroughly than ever before, involved Russian people, 

 it involved Japanese, Danish, plus universities from all over the 

 United States. So we're used to operating in that mode very effec- 

 tively. 



We've forged strong cooperative agreements with institutes of the 

 Russian Academy of Sciences in the Far East, particularly the Pa- 

 cific Oceanological Institute and the Marine Biological Institutes in 

 Vladivostok. We're already working together with them. We also 

 have a similar arrangement with the Marine Biological Institute of 

 the Kola Science Center in Murmansk. And so, we have forged 

 some relationships. We also, for several years, have been working 

 on another avenue to get some Bering Sea information, and that's 

 through the Environmental Bilateral, in which we've taken part in 

 cruises of the academic core lift periodically. Planning is now un- 

 derway through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the next 

 such cruise, also on the Russian side, of the State Committee for 

 Hydrometeorology, for the fourth such expedition scheduled for 

 1993, and our scientists are involved in the planning and will par- 

 ticipate in the cruise. So that could be part of the equation here 

 also. 



Immediate action is imperative therefore to also look at our sys- 

 tems here, our marine ecosystems here. We have heard so much 

 about the concern already in the testimony. And so I don't think 

 we can ignore that while we're addressing the problem of the 

 sources and the distribution. 



Carefully planned research is really the only sound approach to 

 evaluating the impact of pollutants which have been discharged 

 into the Arctic Ocean. But I want to make one final suggestion, and 

 that is let's not look at this as a way of showing that there's a seri- 

 ous problem. Let's use this — let's go on the assumption that our 

 fish are safe, but we've got to demonstrate this. Let's show that the 

 marine mammals don't have radioactive pollution so that people 

 can enjoy their traditional ways of using them. I don't think we 



