SOLAS Norway compiled by Abdirahman Omar

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: 2. Main accomplishments; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Bergen; Greenland; Norway; Global warming; Greenland-Scotland Ridge; Nordic Seas; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.675.2696; http://solas-int.org/files/solas-int/content/downloads/pdf/nat-rep/NorwayJan2012.pdf

Information will be used for: reporting, fundraising, networking, strategic development & outreach 1. Scientific highlight Carbon budget for the Nordic Seas In a study recently published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles- and quoted as a 'Research highlight ' in the November issue of Nature Geoscience, Emil Jeansson and colleagues at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, University of Bergen, present a carbon budget of the Nordic Seas, the ocean area connecting the North Atlantic with the Arctic Ocean. The authors found that the dominating exchange of carbon takes place across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Horizontal transport of carbon in the region is almost two orders of magnitude larger than the uptake from the atmosphere – 12.3 Gt of carbon imported, annually, and 12.5 Gt carbon is exported. The figure shows the net horizontal transport of total carbon in the different gateways of the Nordic Seas. The ‘net ’ term (in italic) shows the resulting transport, when adding all horizontal in and outflows, where the negative sign means that the budget gives a net transport out of the region. Thus, balancing the budget requires an uptake of CO2 the same amount from the atmosphere. Figure: from Jeansson et al., (2011). Jeansson and colleagues estimate an annual export of about 0.09 Gt anthropogenic carbon (excess carbon resulting from perturbations of the “natural ” carbon cycle), from the Nordic Seas to the deep North Atlantic. This is a crucially important pathway for removing the climatically important CO2 from the atmosphere to the interior ocean and thus moderating the potential global warming of global fossil fuel combustion and land-use change.