This project addresses the coupling of two global environmental issues, climate change and contamination by on-going polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and emerging pollutants (microplastics) in the Arctic, their fate and cycling under a scenario of global warming. The growing global PAH emissions from boreal forest and tundra fires together with oil and gas exploration in the Arctic due to more open waters, as a result of climate change, may result in increasing the historical burdens of PAHs in pristine environments like those in the High Arctic. PAHs differ from many other POPs and chemicals of emerging concern, such as microplastics, in that they are unintentional by-products of fossil fuel use and biomass burning and emissions are ongoing. However, to best of our knowledge, no measurements of PAHs, and or microplastics have been performed at terrestrial/aquatic ecosystems in lakes around Conrnwallis Islands, but based on recently studies of other areas of the Arctic at roughly the same latitude, we can anticipate that they will be present. The purpose of this project is-To determine the presence of chemicals related to forest fires as well as microplastics in water from lakes near Resolute -To measure these contaminants in the soils surrounding those lakes and compare with samples already collected in 2015-2016.-To investigate the long term deposits of chemicals and microplastics using sediment cores from lakes near Resolute.