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What do you think of when you think of the Arctic ocean? Belugas weaving through ice floes? Or maybe walruses sunbathing on a chilly beach? How about a polar bear hunting for its next seal snack?

Interview with Louise Steffensen Schmidt (The Nansen Legacy), Postdoc at the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo. Recently, she presented her research work in the lecture: Variability in glacier meltwater runoff to the Barents Sea, at the 3rd Nansen Legacy annual meeting, 10-12 November 2020.

The jet stream is a highway for cyclones, while the sea ice edge has been thought to be a fuel station. Erica Madonnas new study shows that the fuel for cyclones is not simply linked to the location of the ice edge. She explains Barents Sea cyclones as a traffic system.

In science, it is difficult to understand the whole picture when you only have fractions. As a puzzle, the Barents Sea is lacking some of the pieces to be a complete picture that you can hang on the wall.

Scientists in movies and on television are often presented as brilliant people, knowing exactly what they do and what they want to achieve, furthermore, their experiments always succeed. That is, if they fail, they fail spectacularly, becoming mutants, blowing up the world or some such. This post is about real scientists and failing unspectacularly.

Understanding who eats who is important to describe how nutrition and energy move between species in marine ecosystems. The field of research is flourishing like never before thanks to new technology and more advanced methods. These allow us to uncover hitherto unknown connections that occasionally shake up known paradigms in ecology.

Recent “Atlantification” of the Arctic is characterized by warmer ocean temperatures and a reduced sea ice cover. The Barents Sea is a “hot spot” for these changes, something which has broad socioeconomic and environmental impacts in the region. However, there is, at present, no complete understanding of what is causing the ocean warming.

Warm Atlantic water (AW) that flows northward along the Svalbard west coast is thought to
transport enough heat to melt regional Arctic sea ice effectively. Despite this common assumption, quantitative requirements necessary for AW to directly melt sea ice fast enough under realistic winter conditions are still poorly constrained.