Fossil fuels
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The International Mussel Watch Workshop, held in Barcelona, Spain, December 4 to 7, 1978, was convened by the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) and chaired by Edward D. Goldberg of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The workshop had five major goals: 1. To assess the use of bivalves in determining environmental concentrations of chemical pollutants and pathogens 2. To evaluate current data with respect to distinguishing natural from pollutant concentrations for heavy metals and hydrocarbons and determining changes in the amount of pollution as a function of time 3. To formulate effective biological monitoring strategies to complement the measurement of pollutant levels. 4. To appraise techniques for analysis and to propose acceptable methods of carrying out interlaboratory comparisons and standards for all collectives of pollutants and 5. To consider the expansion of the U.S. Mussel Watch Program to a worldwide basis as a continuous monitor of the health of the coastal waters. The workshop was divided into panels, each dealing with a specific topic. The topics were: organochlorides, trace metals, petroleum hydrocarbons, transuranics, mussel health, and monitoring strategies. The following chapters contain reports of the discussions of each of these panels. The chapter Fossil Fuels abstract: ... Bivalves have been used in local, national, and regional studies of fossil fuel pollution -- both chronic and acute. To date, analyses of bivalves have provided useful information about fossil fuels in the environment and will continue to do so in the future. ... We set forth here an assessment of our current knowledge of the concentrations and sources of fossil fuel compounds in bivalves, temporal and spatial distributions, and processes governing these distributions. We also briefly describe the principles and methods of measurements. .... We present here results from representative programs of analyses of fossil fuel compounds in bivalves. Since most of the laboratories involved have not intercalibrated their results in a rigorous manner, strict comparison of data is not possible at this tme. Nevertheless, conclusions on the results within each program can be compared.