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Credit: Michael Gochfeld
Ecologist Joanna Burger holds a female
Eider duck so that one egg can be
colleced for radionucleotide analysis.
Burger and a team of a dozen other
scientists hope to determine whether
underground nuclear testing done in the
1960s in Alaska's Aleutian Islands has
polluted the food chain.
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Credit: Michael Gochfeld
Joanna Burger combs through grass to
collect a gull's egg.
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Rutgers ecologist Joanna Burger spent six weeks of her summer doing research in the Aleutians that 1,200-mile island chain that reaches out from southwest Alaska toward Siberia.
I worked more than 15 hours a day, got almost no sleep and was seasick most of the time but it really was fun, Burger said.
Burger is a professor in the departments of cell biology
and neuroscience in New Brunswick and ecology, evolution and natural resources at Cook College, and a member of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI).
With a dozen other scientists, including her husband, Michael Gochfeld of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and EOHSI, Burger headed out to study possible radioactive contamination in the marine environment surrounding the former atomic test site of Amchitka Island. Marine contamination is of particular concern since 50 to 75 percent of the fish consumed in the United States comes from the adjacent Bering Sea.
At the height of the Cold War, from 1965 to 1971, the U.S. government exploded three nuclear devices underground at Amchitka, including its biggest-ever underground shot a five-megaton blast a mile beneath Cannikan Lake. Amchitka is where American forces battled Japanese invaders during World War II, retaking the island in 1943.
Amchitka is now part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge System. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had conducted an extensive surface cleanup and a subsequent land-based study to rule out any continuing problems, Burger explained.
The real difficulty is that, although they could clean up the surface, underground radioactivity could still possibly leak into the surrounding waters, Burger said. If it comes out near the shore where kelp and organisms live, it could get into the food chain and go from kelp to small fish to big fish and birds, and eventually to humans.
In collaboration with scientists from the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP), Burger labored for two years preparing a biological science plan to assess these potential consequences. The consortium includes Rutgers, EOHSI, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), University of Washington, Vanderbilt University and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
The resulting plan zeroed in on clarifying whether there is a current threat to human beings or the environment around Amchitka, explained CRESP principal investigator Charles Powers of UMDNJ. We also wanted to establish baselines for potential long-term marine life monitoring and future scientific evaluations of the effects of the atomic tests, Powers said.
With a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Burger, Gochfeld and the rest of the team headed north in June into the rain and mist. It was windy all the time, foggy most of the time and it rained half the time, Burger said. There were three components to their study plan: marine ecosystem health, the Aleut subsistence food chain and commercial fisheries.
A team of divers led by marine biologist Steve Jewett of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks sampled the underwater marine ecosystem. Aleuts from neighboring islands whose diet might be in jeopardy helped Burger identify and collect onshore a series of organisms that represented Aleut foodstuffs. A trawl by a nearby government research vessel simulated a commercial catch.
From my perspective as a biologist trying to put the whole picture together, I got to integrate pure science in an ecosystem with subsistence culture and with commercial fisheries and overlay this with a study design that fit all three nuclear test sites and a reference site on another island, Burger said.
Now Burger and her team face a challenge even more daunting than the arctic weather the arduous task of analyzing the huge volume of samples collected which may hold the answers to important questions about the aftermath of nuclear testing in the Aleutians.
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