Air Pollution

Abstract

Until recently, the Arctic environment was treated as a pristine place unspoiled by man. If we take diaries or logbooks of polar explorers from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, we will find a large number of phrases underlying the Arctic’s cleanliness, its crystal air, and sparkling ice. Opinions about the lack of pollution in the Arctic continued to be held to the beginning of the 1970s, although the first documented report of arctic air pollution (coining the term ‘Arctic haze’) was published in 1956 (Mitchell 1956). The renewed interest in the nature and origin of the ‘Arctic haze’ was caused by the growing evidence found during this time that air pollution is not only confined to small areas around urban or industrial sources, but can be transported long distances before being removed to the Earth’s surface. This discovery allows us to conclude that the Arctic atmosphere can be polluted, even though it does not have local sources of pollution. Some scientists returned to the observation of ‘Arctic haze’ made by Mitchell in the early 1950s and the ‘ice crystal haze’ by Greenaway (a Canadian flight lieutanant) in the late 1940s and pointed out that they were not only just an indication of ice crystals or of wind blown dust, but rather of air pollution originating from the mid-latitudes. From this time, there has been a decline in the view that the Arctic is a place where the original state of the globe exists and can be used as reference to measure the human influence on planet Earth.