The geological history of Sinai is complicated and differs from the other parts of the Arabian Nubian Shield. Some rocks in Sinai have a signature from the Grenvillian crust, as evidenced in Wadi Seih area. The ultimate objective of this research is to clarify the progression of episodic island arc accretion events from the amalgamation of Rodinia to the assembly of Gondwana supercontinent.Geochemical, ...

Phthalates are used in plastics, found throughout the marine environment and have the potential to cause adverse health effects. In the present study, we quantified blubber concentrations of 11 phthalates in 16 samples from stranded and/or free-living marine mammals from the Norwegian coast: the killer whale (Orcinus orca), sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), long-finned pilot whale (Globicephala ...

The heating and moistening of inhaled air, and the cooling and moisture removal from exhaled air, are crucial for the survival of animals under severe environmental conditions. Arctic mammals have evolved specific adaptive mechanisms to retain warmth and water and restrict heat loss during breathing. Here, the role of the porous turbinates of the nasal cavities of Arctic and subtropical seals is ...

There is a push for transition to sustainable blue food systems in the High North. An interdisciplinary group of Fram Centre researchers have looked closer at the drivers motivating the transition and identified a set of barriers to sustainable blue food systems in northern Norway.

The Early Miocene Upper Marine Molasse (OMM) in south-western Germany contains a diverse fossil ecosystem in which elasmobranch teeth are especially abundant. However, the scarcity of outcrops and sometimes poor preservation of fossils resulted in scant recent literature about the OMM. Here, we focus on the elasmobranch fauna to determine the trophic relationships within the OMM, using fossil ...

Ruminants are dependent on their gut microbiomes for nutrient extraction from plant diets. However, knowledge about the composition, diversity, function, and spatial structure of gut microbiomes, especially in wild ruminants, is limited, largely because analysis has been restricted to faeces or the rumen. In two geographically separated reindeer subspecies, 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing revealed ...

Strong seasonality is a key feature of high-latitude systems like the Barents Sea. While the interannual variability and long-term changes of the Barents Sea are well-documented, the seasonal progression of the physical and biological systems is less known, mainly due to poor accessibility of the seasonally ice-covered area in winter and spring. Here, we use an extensive set of physical and biological ...

The northwestern Barents Sea (NW-BS) is a highly productive region within the transitional zones of an Atlantic to Arctic-dominated marine ecosystem. The steep latitudinal gradients in sea ice concentration, Atlantic and Arctic Water, offer an opportunity to test hypotheses on physical drivers of spatial and temporal variability of net primary production (NPP). However, quantifying NPP in such a ...

Methane-cycling is becoming more important in high-latitude ecosystems as global warming makes permafrost organic carbon increasingly available. We explored 387 samples from three high-latitudes regions (Siberia, Alaska and Patagonia) focusing on mineral/organic soils (wetlands, peatlands forest), lake/pond sediment and water. Physicochemical, climatic and geographic variables were integrated ...

Classification of zooplankton to species with broadband echosounder data could increase the taxonomic resolution of acoustic surveys and reduce the dependence on net and trawl samples for ‘ground truthing’. Supervised classification with broadband echosounder data is limited by the acquisition of validated data required to train machine learning algorithms (‘classifiers’). We tested the hypothesis ...