Fram Centre

Where seals dare

Glacier fronts along Svalbard’s coast are dangerous places. Huge blocks of ice detach and crash into the ocean below, making data collection all but impossible. Now, researchers have found a solution: attaching sensors to ringed seals that dare to go where humans cannot. Seals make brave research assistants!
September 05, 2019

Confronting one of our greatest challenges – plastic waste in nature

The oceans are filling with plastic. The water in some great Asian rivers is no longer visible below the flowing mass of trash. A rare Cuvier’s beaked whale stranded off the coast of Hordaland with its stomach full of plastic. Plastic waste is a formidable problem – with an unexpected possible solution.
June 03, 2019

Monitoring whales with drones

Two researchers hunker by a fjord, oblivious to the magical blue of the January twilight. All their attention is focused on an unmanned aerial vehicle – a UAV. Gloveless despite the bitter cold, they manipulate the joystick and buttons on the remote control with numb fingers, preparing the drone for take-off.
May 31, 2019

Polar cod early life stages up against a changing Arctic

Transparent eggs floating just beneath the ocean’s surface signal the beginning of life for one of the Arctic’s most abundant pelagic fish: polar cod. Throughout the Arctic, these small fish form the basis of many seabirds, seal, and whale diets. How will the millions of eggs and larvae handle future stressors?
May 03, 2019

Assessing the consequences of oil spills on commercial fish

The fisheries industry regularly harvests a share of managed commercial fish stocks. Fram Centre researchers examined the impact of oil spills on Norway’s main commercial fisheries, the Northeast Arctic cod, using advanced simulation technology.
April 23, 2019

Roundness of mineral particles in subsea tailings from copper mining

Copper mines obviously yield copper, but they also produce waste material – tailings – which must be disposed of somehow. In Norway, tailings have often been dumped in fjords as an alternative to disposal on land. The environmental impact of this practice over time is not known.
April 11, 2019

When plastic becomes part of Arctic fish diets

As consumers, we constantly hear that we should cut down our use of plastic packaging and choose textiles made from natural materials, free from plastics. But does it really matter so much? A fresh study from the Arctic Ocean provides gloomy evidence of why it matters.
April 01, 2019

To the future and back: Future governance of environmental risk

How can we manage environmental risk across 1 979 179 km² of the ocean and 100 915 km of coastline? How can we make a contingency plan to protect this vast area? And how can we make a new plan every fourth year with comparable results? That’s what the Norwegian Coastal Administration had to figure out.
March 25, 2019

Profile 2019: A woman of action

Environmental chemist Dorte Herzke has an urgent mission. If she always seems to be locked away in the lab it’s because that’s where the magic happens, where she and her team are trying to figure out how to save the world.
March 21, 2019

Atlantification of the marine ecosystem in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard

Climate warming is rapidly altering the physical marine environment in fjords on the west coast of Svalbard towards a more temperate state. Reductions in sea ice cover and increased ocean temperatures are evident, resulting in changes of ice-associated and pelagic ecosystems.
March 18, 2019

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