Understanding climate
for the benefit of society

Ellen Viste

Rådgiver / Adviser

Bjerknes-UiB

Jahnebakken 5, Bergen

Profile picture for user Ellen Viste

E-mail: ellen.viste@uib.no

Phone: 55584393

Leaving Christmas preparations and northern winter storms behind, geologists from Bergen have travelled to the far south. On the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Ocean, they will search for the westerlies of ancient times. 

The Gulfstream makes northern Europe warmer by transporting heat. This is well known. New research shows that the sea surface temperature also affects storm tracks as far away as the Pacific.

An international research project has determined the amount of man-made CO2 emissions taken up by the ocean from the atmosphere between 1994 and 2007.

Almost one-fifth of the world’s population depends on rivers coming from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Yet, only one in a thousand glaciers and lakes in this region have monitoring stations and constraints on the hydrological cycle are poor, Hans Christian Steen-Larsen and colleagues writes in a comment in Nature. 

The temperature of the subpolar North Atlantic is going lower. This implies decreasing cod stocks in the Barents Sea over the next five to six years, shows study.