Barrow, Alaska. All photos from: BBC Earth

There is plenty of news on the alarming reduction of polar ice caps and the detrimental effect it has on polar bear populations. However, there is another, hidden problem that is hurting a different community just as much as these giant bears, and it is affecting the humans living in the northernmost town in the United States: Barrow, Alaska.

The big unspoken worry in the north is that large deposits of chemical pollutants are trapped within the ice.

For decades that was not a problem. But now rising temperatures are causing the ice to melt faster than ever. The area of summer sea ice has shrunk by 10% per decade since 1979, and in May 2016 the ice extent was the smallest in 38 years.

That means trapped chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are escaping and infecting animals like seals, the prey of choice for everything from polar bears to people.

Many of these chemicals have been banned for decades. They have been confined deep in the ice all this time and are perfectly preserved, like the sap-stuck mosquitos in Jurassic Park.

A study published in 2015 followed subsistence hunts from 1987 to 2007 and found significant amounts of PCBs in the internal organs and blubber of locally-harvested seals. The researchers concluded that, while levels of older banned contaminants are dropping, modern pollutants are rising.

That is problematic, because native Alaskans’ diets are largely comprised of seal.

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