Fact Sheets from The Nansen Legacy

Welcome to our fact sheets! 

The topics of our 15 fact sheets are shown as bold text below, including five new fact sheets available from august 2025: Seasonality, Smarter sensors, Fish population dynamics, Long-term climate change, Paleo perspectives.

The Nansen Legacy project has investigated the Barents Sea system with focus on both the physical environment represented by Atlantic Water Inflow and the Sea ice in the Barents Sea. Arctic weather prediction illustrates how knowledge of sea ice, snow and open ocean improves weather forecasts. The living Barents Sea is included in many of the fact sheets, but the one on Biodiversity addresses in particular the many organisms found in sea ice, the open water and on the sea floor. Examples on human impact on the Barents Sea system is illustrated with the example of Ocean acidification that is resulting from the increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, contaminants like Mercury and how it accumulates in the organisms through the food web, and the challenge linked to Multiple stressors that organisms in the Arctic marine ecosystem presently experience. The future Barents Sea outlines the future environmental conditions and ecosystem and illustrates how our decisions today on carbon emission levels are too late to impact the 2050 Barents Sea, but have major implications for the Barents Sea 2100. Finally, information on the entire project The Nansen Legacy and the important topic of Data management that ensures accessible and reusable data are presented in the condenses way of fact sheets. 

Seasonality visualizes in an innovative way how different parts and processes of the Barents Sea system is more or less impacted by the seasonal shifts through the year. Through complementary use of smarter sensors, complementary observational pyramids can provide observations across time and space to improve our observational capacity in the Arctic. Fish population dynamics in the northern Atlantic Ocean is influenced by more than just physical conditions, and through modelling and whole genome sequencing new knowledge on capelin, polar cod and Atlantic cod is established. Paleo perspectives illustrate how the deglaciation of the Barents Sea progressed 20 000 years ago, influenced by Atlantic water currents, like today. Long-term climate change show how different proxies are used to reveal past climate in the Barents Sea, and place the present changes in a long-term perspective.

• Seasonality (2025)
• Smarter sensors (2025)
• Fish population dynamics (2025)
• Long-term climate change (2025)
• Paleo perspectives (2025)