Reports on ICES intercalibrations of mercury and cadmium in sea water, 1979

The Oslo and Paris Commissions are international bodies established by treaty for the prevention of marine pollution of the North East Atlantic by dumping from ships and aircraft and from land-based sources. The Commissions have established a Joint Monitoring Group (the JMG), one of whose tasks has been the organization of a joint monitoring programme. The JMG recognized the importance of intercalibrating the participating laboratories prior to obtaining meaningful and comparable monitoring data on pollutants in sea water and it requested the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) to conduct intercalibrations for· mercury and cadmium. Previous intercalibrations on behalf of ICES for trace metals in sea water have involved mixed standard solutions (Jones, 1976)1), natural sea water samples of different metal concentrations (Jones, 1977) and both natural and spiked sea water for the analysis of mercury only (61afsson, 1978). The Marine Research Institute, Reykjavik, undertook to coordinate on behalf of ICES

the mercury in sea water intercalibration for JMG while the parallel cadmium intercalibration exercise was carried out by the Institute Scientifique et Technique des P~ches Maritimes, Nantes, France.