Dr Kimberly Hageman
It's the list of banned chemicals established by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), a global treaty meant to protect human health and the environment from these chemicals.
The POPs list includes DDT, dioxin, PCBs and others - 12 chemicals or chemical groups that persist in the environment, bio-accumulate in food webs, and are toxic to humans and wildlife.
These chemicals are banned in New Zealand, but their persistence means they are still present in our environment - and this is the crux of Hageman's work.
Chemicals such as DDT are still found in soils - or example, from old sheep dip sites - and continue to evaporate into the atmosphere.
These vaporised chemicals travel in the atmosphere but their "semi-volatile" nature causes them to condense back to the earth at cold temperatures, creating higher than expected concentrations in high mountains, Antarctica and other cold places.
"New Zealand's South Island is an excellent place to study the atmospheric transport of contaminants in high mountains," Hageman says.
"The Southern Alps are surrounded by a simple contaminant source pattern - most of the regional contaminants originate on the east side and the whole system is surrounded by ocean.
Our aim is to investigate how the concentrations and ratios of chemicals change along a transect from the Canterbury Plains to the West Coast."
Hageman is also working on an Antarctica project with biologists from the University of Canterbury and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.
POPs and other contaminants will be measured in milk and blood from lactating Weddell seals. Because seal milk is high in fat and these contaminants are lipophilic or "fat-loving", POPs are transferred from mother to pup during nursing.
"I love collaborating with scientists from other disciplines - you would be hard pressed to find a chemist that knows how to milk a seal!" Hageman says.
FUNDING
University of Otago Research Grant