Mercury in landlocked Arctic char

Mercury in landlocked Arctic char is an open dataset from Environment and Climate Change Canada with 10 files (HTML, CSV); catalogue record updated 2024-02-14. On CanQuery you can open its CSV or Excel file as a table, filter, chart and export up to 10,000 rows as CSV and follow the original downloads. Files are available in English and French.

This project is part of the Northern Contaminants Program core monitoring and looks at contaminant levels in landlocked Arctic char from lakes in Nunavut over time. Landlocked char are the only top predators in most Canadian high Arctic lakes and, therefore, can serve as a sentinel species for monitoring changes in contaminants. The project has information on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), mercury and other elements in char from lakes near the community of Resolute Bay, Nunavut and for Lake Hazen in Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island spanning up to 30 years. Results to date show that mercury concentrations in char from most of the study lakes have remained steady or have declined over the past ~10 years. Concentrations of most POPs are also declining steadily, except for total chlorobenzenes which were found to be increasing since the mid-2000s. This increase, which is mainly due to hexachlorobenzene, has also been observed in other studies of seabirds and ringed seals and suggests that there are still major emissions of chlorobenzenes despite its phase out globally under the Stockholm Convention. This study is on-going and would not be possible without…

Publisher

Environment and Climate Change Canada

Resources

10

Catalogue metadata updated

2024-02-14