Arctic contaminants researcher wins $100K lifetime achievement award

A Canadian government scientist who has attracted attention for his research in Arctic contaminants was given a lifetime achievement award by a charitable foundation on Wednesday.

Derek Muir is the recipient of the $100,000 Weston Family prize for northern research by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

Muir, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, was born in Montreal and is based in Burlington, Ont.

He looked at contaminant levels in Arctic marine mammals and fish over the years, "and that led to a great explosion of information," he said in a phone interview from Ottawa, saying they found "relatively high levels in some animals."

The contaminants tend to accumulate in wildlife and take a significant amount of time to break down. They can spread around in the environment, including through animals eating other animals.

Seals and beluga whales are a couple of the animals that are frequently measured for contaminant levels, which is important from a food security standpoint, Muir said.

"You felt you were having an impact because the results were immediately being used both internally to create programs and, shortly after that, in the 1990s, they were taken to the international level," he said.

Some of his research was used during negotiations of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a global treaty to protect people and the environment from toxic chemicals.

"Canada is actually very active on this issue," Muir said, noting that the government has done work to declare some substances that are no longer unusable in the country.

$50K cash

Over the years, the concentrations of the chemicals under that convention have generally been on a decline in a significant number of animals, he said.

"So that's the really good news. The somewhat less good news is that there's just a whole bunch of other substances, which are either replacements for these things or they're just things we haven't thought about before, haven't look at in the environment before, and we're finding them in our wildlife," he said.

"There are more chemicals showing up in our wildlife than we ever anticipated maybe 20 to 30 years ago."

They're not at levels as high as the more problematic contaminants, but they're still a concern, Muir said.

Contaminants generally travel from highly-populated communities further south to the North via the atmosphere. Some are also ending up in the North via ocean water.

Continuous support of the kind of research he does is important, Muir said, though he said part of the focus might be worth tweaking.

"Should we do more work on a broader range of chemicals to avoid what you might call the streetlight effect, where you're kind of looking just at the portion of the street that's illuminated?" he said.

The prize includes $50,000 in unencumbered cash and more funding for a research fellowship position. Muir said he wants to use the former for further research.