Plastic waste is high on the environmental agenda. Unfortunately, much of the marine litter in Norwegian waters originates from the fishing and aquaculture industries. Researchers are now working with these and other industries to find ways to eliminate or reduce the problems plastics cause.
Retrospective: Norway’s relationship with its superpower neighbour to the east has often been tense. In this article, Salve Dahle and co-authors give an eyewitness account of the time just after the fall of the Soviet Union, when cross-border tensions began to ease.
Ringed seals and polar bears are not the only Arctic organisms that depend on sea ice. Thousands of microscopic plants and animals also utilise sea ice, but they are poorly known and rarely described to the public. Recent findings suggest that sea ice is an important nursery ground for many of them.
In 2018 an arctic fox captured in a trap had a fishing net around its neck. In 2019 a picture was taken of arctic fox scat with a lot of brightly coloured pieces of plastic in it. These events persuaded us to investigate if ingestion of human litter is a problem for the arctic fox population.
Global climate warming is most severe in the Arctic. One consequence is a widespread reduction in permafrost. Continuous, stable permafrost can act as a physical glue that helps anchor unstable slopes. Increasingly, scientists are reporting collapse of rock slopes in the High Arctic.
Changes in seabird breeding productivity reflect hemispheric differences in ocean warming and human use, and call out the need for policies that reduce the impacts of climate change on the world’s marine ecosystems.
The Norwegian Environmental Specimen Bank, established in 2012, contains frozen samples of animals, plants, air, and mud from mainland Norway and Svalbard. These samples are time capsules, preserving the present environmental state for future analysis, and providing regulators with an important tool.
Aquaculture has become a major part of global food production, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, it is now the fastest-growing animal food-producing industry. In the North, further growth in salmon farming is expected. What mechanisms are in place to regulate this growth?
When plastic first arrived on the scene, it was welcomed as a benefit for humanity. Fascinated, the French philosopher Roland Barthes envisioned “a plasticised world” in his book Mythologies (1957). Now Barthes’ vision has become reality, for better and worse, and enthusiasm for plastic has dwindled.