The Arctic environment is currently undergoing unprecedented changes. Physical changes to the cryosphere including diminished summer sea-ice cover, ablating glaciers and changes to permafrost regions are having marked effects on the character of the Arctic. These changes are also affecting contaminant entry, transfer, and transformations, as well as bioaccumulation pathways. With the presence of 4th level carnivores (eg. polar bears, arctic fox, and glaucous gulls), Arctic food webs have always been vulnerable to bioaccumulative chemicals and their biological effects and this may be exacerbated by warming trends. A wide range of subject areas will be addressed, in both platform talks and posters, hence broadening the appeal of this session to many scientists with areas such as emerging contaminants, predictive fate and exposure modelling, pollutant process studies and contaminant trends and biological effects. This session is timely for the SETAC World Congress given the recent scientific efforts as part of the International Polar Year (IPY) (with recent and pending IPY conferences over the 2011/12 period) as well as the growing public awareness to the geopolitical tensions within the Arctic as climate change brings new opportunities and threats. This session strongly compliments a special Session with invited speakers on “Polar regions as messengers of global processes”.

Due to your expertise and interest in this topic, we would like to invite you to submit an abstract. The conference website provides guidelines for the preparation and submission of your abstracts http://berlin.setac.eu. The length of an abstract should not exceed 2500 characters, including spaces. The abstract submission deadline is 30th November 2011. All abstracts must be submitted via the online abstract submission page provided on the SETAC World Congress web-pages.

Please forward this mail to other colleagues who might be interested in this field of research.
We are looking forward to an inspiring and interesting session!

Best wishes,

Dr. Crispin Halsall, Lancaster University, Lancaster Environment Centre, UK – Chair
Dr. Geir W. Gabrielsen, Norwegian Polar Institute, NO – Co-chair
Dr. Roland Kallenborn, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), NO – Co-chair