The Arctic is white. The Arctic is melting. The Arctic is scary. It is the Arctic in our minds? You to sound, We live with passion expressed words at the table of the mayor of Tromso, a few hours before we went aboard the coast guard vessel: “here. We don’t want to, that is a Museum. We don’t want people to think is white, she melts, she is scary.”
Or the words of their colleague, up in Hammerfest, until a few years ago, the northernmost city in the world: The people in the South, had no idea, she said, and your words of Pride and restlessness languages at the same time. What you put up here on the legs. As this is going on. “This is the place to be!”, she exclaimed at some point. In the Arctic, something is happening, actually.
Tromso, a town on the top of the 69. Degree of latitude. 200 kilometers of air line, Hammerfest, once more into the darkness, a few steps only before the end of the continent. And in between a night on the polar sea. On the way from Tromsø to Hammerfest with the KV Andenes, 3300 gross registered tons, 105 meters long. Now, shortly after midnight, the view of the ocean. She is black, the Arctic is melting, and it is of such eerie beauty that you will forgive the full moon, whose bright light give streaks today, losing Northern lights, only a few pale green.
up There, a few hours further to the North, is the Tønsnes on-the-go – a small fishing boat, about 50 meters long. The Tønsnes catches up with their nets, nets full of cod, four days ago until you run out of Tromsø, as we do, now your stomach is already half full. Cod is for the people at home, cod for Lithuania, the cod for the Fish and Chips of London.
mass tourism in Spitsbergen
The fish, you move to the North. And with them the fishermen. Everything is moving to the North. The Salmon Farmers. The Crusaders. The Copper Mines. The Gas Companies. The Oil Tanker. In the wardroom of the KV Andenes Birger Inge is brigtsen, Chief of Operations at the Norwegian coast guard. “The ice in the Arctic sea disappears,” he says. Keep track of this for years: the Advance of the fish, the boat, the tourists. “We now have shrimp fishermen to the North of the 83. Degree of latitude. And in summer cruise travel with 7000 passengers in Svalbard.”
Ingebrigtsens words, speaks in concern. Earlier they were only for rescue missions up to 83. Wide degree of responsibility, now you need to monitor the ocean up to the North pole. With only 13 ships. “This is causing us enormous problems.”
No Region of the earth to the climate change as quickly and as strongly as the Arctic. The sea ice reflects the sun’s light and casts it back into the atmosphere. The ice melts more sunlight is absorbed by the sea, the water warms up faster, which in turn leads to still more ice to melt even faster. The temperatures rise in the Arctic, twice to three times as fast as in the Rest of the world.
record prices for cod
A few hours later on the Tønsnes. Dag Martin Tverborgvik, the on-duty inspector, slips into the protective suit that can keep him five, six hours on life, he should be professional risk falling into the Arctic sea. If the lake is too rough, then you take the helicopter, then descend on the other ships. Today, however, he and his colleagues to the speed boat to climb, with 30 to 40 knots it jumps over the black waves. The boat turns, the crew is a rope ladder on Board. Tverborgvik and the other jump from the fluctuating speed boat to the ladder, pulling themselves up.
After the Welcome Tverborgvik first checks the nets. The inspector rushes into the battle room, where the nightly catch on conveyor belts advancing on four men. Silently heads of the fish, and, take, the noise of the machines. The fishermen report the nature and quantity of your Catch correctly? You hide the fish? Fishing in forbidden waters? All the testing in Norway, the inspectors of the coast guard. Officer of the law should be, environmentalists. And Savior, if ships in distress.
On the Tønsnes of captain Kurt Bendiksen coffee is served. He has seen in his 30 years as a fisherman, as well as today we went fishing in these waters is rare. The fishermen at the bottom of the battle space, you will earn up to 100’000 Euro in the year. “So good prices for the cod, we had my good always never,” says Bendiksen. “In the past, we are never with the cod to Spitsbergen. Now you have to fish up there even shrimp.”
It attracts the big money
The water is warmer, the cod and the like. The polar pulls of cod but with the ice its spawning grounds disappear. Whales and seals are competing with the immigrants from the South-West EMS feed. The fat layer of the seal will be thinner, says Tore Haug, scientists from the marine research Institute in Tromsø. At the same time, rising CO2 concentrations are acidifying the waters. “Many species in the ocean, shells or tanks. You are the water in the acid?”
One of the last unspoiled regions of the world is day by day less untouchable. New adventures beckon. Suddenly diving between the smaller and smaller ice floes families on sailing boats. Surfers come to surf the Arctic. “Between all of the melting ice, a lot of money to be made,” said the presenter at this year’s “Arctic Frontiers”conference in Tromsø. The conference brings each year, Arctic experts, at 69. Latitude. But also Big Oil, Big Gas, Tour, wholesale, fishermen, Aqua farmers: shining eyes of all places. Russia is happy about a soon for the commercial shipping ice-free northeast passage of the containers from Asia to Europe faster travel. Greenland has invested in the extraction of minerals, the thawing earth: platinum, Gold, silver, Nickel, Palladium, and diamonds.
Tromsø, called recently, “capital of the Arctic”, said the second-strongest growth of all Norwegian cities. “Our economy stands,” says tromsø mayor Kristin Røymo at a lunch. And with the economy the population is growing.
Oil production in the country in the renewable energies
in the southern city of Hammerfest, many young people return. “You suddenly believe again in the future,” says Marianne Sivertsen Næss, the Deputy mayor. The sun of snow white – Snøhvit on the Norwegian.
Snøhvit is a gas field, far out under the Barents sea, in 1984 discovered that since 2008, tapped through a 143 kilometres long Pipeline to come to Hammerfest. A fairy tale, actually: Since it’s raining money. The group Equinor pays the town each year alone 200 million crowns of property taxes.
22% of all undiscovered Oil and gas reserves in the world are found in the Arctic, almost all of it under the bottom of the lake. The race has begun, Russia sprints ahead. While Norway needed its own energy refers to 98 percent from renewable sources, given by the government in Oslo at the same time the green light for the exploitation of new Arctic Oil and gas fields, as high in the North as never before.
Contradictory
An ecological sin, say critics. The people in Hammerfest to see the different. You horror on Brussels, where the EU Parliament voted two years ago on a more symbolic application, all Oil and gas wells to the North of the 62. Latitude, the protection of the Arctic and the climate’s sake. Do you want to prohibit us next to the Breathe?, ask local politicians. The application in Brussels fell through, but if you understood the applicant correctly, you were more likely to allow future generations to Breathe.
this year’s Arctic conference in Tromsø was chosen as the Motto “Smart Arctic”. If one of the pair of Climate scientists are listened to, the peer-reviewed there, we could see only despair, but also the amazement that the world does not want to see the characters. However, without the effect you don’t stay, the reports, such as those described recently, the warming of the climate on Svalbard: rain instead of snow in the Arctic December, thawing soils, the January to 4.7 degrees warmer than the normal of 98. such month in a row. In Tromsø, the people will build because of climate change in the future, their new homes further away from the coast. You want to make the city as car-free. Tromsø is one of the places that want no Oil and no Gas.
What happens in the Arctic stays in the Arctic. “Here, we are not able to refrain from the consequences of happens. But everything is connected with everything,” says researcher Tore Haug.
And at the conference in Tromsø, called Norway’s foreign Minister, Ine to Eriksen Søreide to the people outside, you should look to the Arctic: “We have seen it here first. And soon it hits you.”
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 25.02.2019, 20:26 PM
