Alas! We remain unshowered! Our luck improved since our first sampling attempt on Edgeøya, and finally we were beginning to fill our sample bottle storage box. As our boat made its way through glassy waters surrounded by steep, scoured cliffs where landslides had exposed the permafrost in some areas, we…
Our journey started well. Although our vessel, the Magnus Zaremba came into Longyearbyen a little later than planned, we had it loaded and set out to sea by the evening. We were headed to the furthest sampling site in our plan, a beach on Edgeøya, located in the Storfjorden on…
It was a dark and stormy night… No, actually it was a bright and sunny night when we arrived at Longyearbyen airport at 1:30am. With the midnight sun greeting us among the snow-capped mountains and rippling waters of the Adventfjorden, it felt like a totally different world – and that’s…
Second part of the Arctic Marine Beach Litter expedition At this moment, we are sailing on the Ortelius with Oceanwide Expeditions around the northern tip of Spitsbergen. We are on our way to the next monitoring location of this second part of the Arctic Marine Litter expedition. Like the first…
The first time on the water is always a bit hectic, developing the best working process with the equipment and research team. After a few hours everything worked fine and we were able to complete the whole sampling we had scheduled for that location. Fulmars joined us around the boat during the whole sampling. So what did we do during sampling?
Monitoring for litter on Poolepynten and Sarstangen shows the ocean pollution of the Gulfstream. On its way to the North, the Gulfstream will pick up any litter item that floats. When these items arrive in the Arctic, they will remain here. This is why the amount of litter in the Arctic is building up every year. As a consequence, the sea around Svalbard ends up becoming the drain hole of the Gulfstream.
During the first litter monitoring on Jan Mayen, it was noticable that much of the found litter was fishery litter. We found 104 floats or pieces of floats, bits of net (26), tangled nets (20) and ropes (43) on the beach.
In remote regions such as the Arctic, some beaches are literally strewn with large pieces of litter such as nets, buoys, household plastics and other waste. This raises all kinds of questions. How can so much marine litter end up here? What is it exactly? How does it find its way into the ocean? And where does it come from? One could also wonder whether there is a link to certain economic activities in Svalbard, or whether the litter has come from further afield. If so, from where and how?
‘We currently get most of the proteins we need from eating meat, but the cultivation of seaweed is much less damaging to the environment than meat production. Giant seaweed farms have the potential to provide the entire world population with protein and so save our scarce land-based resources. Seaweed processing platforms will replace the oil platforms of today. So is mariculture the future? I believe it is: there are plenty of opportunities waiting. Let’s eat more seaweed!’.
– By : Steve Geelhoed – Off survey flight The sun shines over northern Scotland. We are in our hotel in Inverness though. Off effort. Validating data from the last three days of surveying. The wind is too strong to survey. The last days the weather was suitable enough to…