Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The long term objectives of this research program are to understand how humans poison soil and how soil poisons humans in an Arctic context. The short term objectives are to: (1) characterize how hydrocarbon pollution impacts High Arctic deserts and (2) describe how Arctic peoples are exposed to soil bound pollutants. Polar deserts cover a vast area of the islands in the Canadian Arctic but very little is known about the soil ecosystems of these deserts. I hypothesize that within the sorted circles present in Polar Deserts, there is a deep, productive soil material, called a Bhy. I hypothesize that these Bhy soils are a critical component of the Arctic deserts and are essential to the long term survival on these ecosystems. Over the next five years, we will investigate these Bhy's in three different polar deserts to characterize the ecology and importance of these deep soil horizons. Once we have characterized the ecology of these Bhy soils, we will evaluate how toxic hydrocarbons are to this subsurface ecology. Many Arctic towns are dusty and unpaved and thus, hydrocarbons can readily transfer from Arctic soils to humans. I hypothesize that new environmental models will be able to predict the transfer of hydrocarbons from soil to humans. We will evaluate this by characterizing how hydrocarbons transfer from soils to animals and compare the results to our calculations. If our calculations don't work, we will evaluate how small biochemical reactors can characterize the transfer of hydrocarbons to humans. This will allow us to replace the use of animals in site risk assessment and allow regulators to update their models on how hydrocarbons move from soils to Arctic peoples. In Canada, environmental protection standards must protect ecosystems and humans at the same time. This project will provide the ecological and human data needed to update environmental protection standards in Canada's Arctic.