Svalbard News

An earthquake hit Svalbard with 6.2 force in Richter scale on 21 February 2008, the Norsar seismic research institute said on Thursday.

The epicentre was located in Storfjorden, 10 km under the sea and 130 km south est of Longyearbyen. No damage has been caused in Longyearbyen.

Smaller shakes have been registered after the main one, has reported Norsar.

Norsar added that it was the strongest quake in Norway since it started keeping records about a century ago. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed the magnitude of the quake was 6.2.

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Four years after The Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Line Cinema (Time Warner) is bringing a second series of popular novels to the big screen: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.

The Golden Compass is the first novel in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. The trilogy tells the story of Lyra, a 12-year-old girl who embarks to Svalbard to battle the forces of evil and rescue her best friend. In Philip Pullman's trilogy, Svalbard is the kingdom of armoured bears Panserbjörne.

The project was announced in February 2002. Set for release on Dec. 7, The Golden Compass has been directed by Chris Weitz. With a budget of $200 million, this is the most expensive movie New Line Cinema has ever made.

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Arctic plants can migrate the distances needed to survive climatic changes, scientists have suggested in a study of flowering plant species found in Svalbard.

With climatic changes, habitats are expected to shift further north and plants' inability to move quickly enough is a cause for concern.

Researchers from University of Oslo, Norway and Alpine Ecology Laboratory of Grenoble, France analyzed more than 4 000 samples of nine flowering plant species of the Svalbard archipelago.

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Greenhouse gases have climbed to record highs in the atmosphere , said Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, which runs the Zeppelin measuring station in Ny-Alesund.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide had risen to 390 parts per million from 388 ppm a year ago. Holmen said that levels have hit peaks almost every year in recent decades, far above 270 ppm level seen before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

Carbon dioxide or CO2 is the main greenhouse gas, emitted by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and transport.

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The final architectural design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault that will house seed samples of nearly every country has been unveiled by the Norwegian government.

The seed vault will be built into a mountain near Longearbyen, the largest settlement in the Svalbard archipelago. The vault aims to protect agricultural heritage of humankind from catastrophes, such as nuclear wars, asteroid strikes and global warming.

The Norwegian government is paying $ 5 million for the project which will have enough space for three million seed samples. The collection and the maintenance of the facility will be organized by Global Crop Diversity Trust.

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Norway intends to invite American politicians in Svalbard to observe the effects of global warming in Arctic, said in December the norwegian Foreign Minister.

"Our experience is that it has a good effect to invite decision-makers and give them the opportunity to see the effects of global warming themselves" declared Jonas Gahr Stoere.

Stoere points out that Norway chairs the Arctic Council for the period 2006-2008 and that polar regions are experiencing climate change more intensely than other areas in the world. The Foreign Minister said that the world needs that the United States imply themselves in the efforts to reduce the global warming, even if they did not ratify the Kyoto protocol.

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Located on the island of Nordaustlandet, the Austfonna ice cap, with a surface of 8100 km2 and a glacier front of 200 km long, is one of the largest ice cap of Arctic after Greenland.

Because of its remote location, little research has been done on this ice cap in comparison with other glaciers in Svalbard. Since 2004, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the University of Oslo have carried out annual field campaigns on Austfonna. These measurements include snow pits, mass balance stakes, GPS for the elevation changes and radar to measure snow cover. In addition, two automatic weather stations are installed to study the energy balance.

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The Russian mining city of Barentsburg, second city of Svalbard with 500 inhabitants, could be evacuated if open flames break out on a vast pile of coal mine waste that is smoldering.

After an inspection carried out at the end of October, Norwegian experts said that the immediate danger seemed to be over after Russians workers moved out the smoldering coals.

However for some mining experts like Norwegian Per Zakken Brekke, the danger of a big fire is not over (NRK radio network).

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Statistics Norway (SSB), has just published its statistical yearbook 2005 for Svalbard. The publication contains statistics on everything from the living conditions, the tourist activity, the environment, until the meteorological conditions and the evolution of the polar bear population.

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An-Magritt Jensen and Kari Moxnes, sociologists of family and childhood, are interested in the particularity of the families living in Longyearbyen. They are currently interviewing families in Longyearbyen about their every-day life for their research at the Department of Sociology and Political Science of the University of Trondheim (NTNU).

For these sociologists, when using the keywords families and Svalbard on search engines, the results do not refer to human families but rather to flowers families or polar bears. However Longyearbyen has more and more the aspects of a family society, a development which is politically approved as a stabilizing element of the population in Svalbard. Three aspects of the family society in Longyearbyen are approached in this study.

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An intact specimen of the ''tyrannosaurus of the sea'', a 150 million year-old pliosaur, was discovered last summer in Spitsbergen in the area of Diabasodden, by a team of paleontologists from the University of Oslo led by professors Jørn Hurum and Hans Arne Nakrem.

Until now, only fragments of this predator have been found in England, Russia and Argentina. Nicknamed ''The Monster'' by the team which discovered it, this specimen measures approximately 8 to 9 meters length and was to weigh between 10 and 15 tons.

The pliosaurs (or short-necked plesiosaurs) were aquatic, carnivorous mesozoic reptiles, from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

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