Ellen Viste

Leaving Christmas preparations and northern winter storms behind, geologists from Bergen have travelled to the far south. On the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Ocean, they will search for the westerlies of ancient times. 

In the coldest years of the last ice age, the ice cap reached the British Isles and Poland. New research has revealed a green patch much closer to the North Pole. Part of a peninsula in Svalbard was free from ice.

«The mid-latitudes are one big, chaotic mess”, says Camille Li.

The Gulfstream makes northern Europe warmer by transporting heat. This is well known. New research shows that the sea surface temperature also affects storm tracks as far away as the Pacific.

An international research project has determined the amount of man-made CO2 emissions taken up by the ocean from the atmosphere between 1994 and 2007.

The living conditions for marine microorganisms in the Southern Ocean may dramatically worsen by the end of the century. More acidic water can make their territories shallower.

Almost one-fifth of the world’s population depends on rivers coming from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Yet, only one in a thousand glaciers and lakes in this region have monitoring stations and constraints on the hydrological cycle are poor, Hans Christian Steen-Larsen and colleagues writes in a comment in Nature. 

The temperature of the subpolar North Atlantic is going lower. This implies decreasing cod stocks in the Barents Sea over the next five to six years, shows study.

Norway may need less electricity in the future, a new study of consequences of climate change in Europe shows. 

During the last interglacial, there were large variations in the circulation in the South Atlantic, both at the surface and at depth. The overturning circulation in the Atlantic was still maintained.