Cold seeps are chemosynthetic habitats found in both deep sea and shallow ocean-shelves worldwide, including the polar regions. At seeps, hydrocarbons, sulfide, and other reduced compounds emerge from the seafloor, providing energy to fuel chemoautotrophic production. Microbial assemblages, supported by the oxidation and reduction of gases and fluids, form the base of a food web composing unique and ...

The main objective of the PhD study was to improve the knowledge about the ecology of the benthic foraminiferal faunas thus increasing the precision of benthic foraminifera as indicators for modern and past Arctic fjord and shelf environments. The investigation of living (stained) benthic foraminifera assemblages in Kongsfjorden (western Svalbard) was performed on inter-annual and seasonal time ...

With pharma R & D witnessing rising cost, high attrition rates and an overall decline in productivity in recent times, newer approaches are needed for more efficient early phase drug discovery. This thesis describes a new approach, “biofocussed chemoprospecting”. The essence of the approach is to use diverse, yet “bio-like” compounds for efficient hit-finding, along with property filtering and ...

The focus of this work is in developing biology–based tools for environmental monitoring and risk assessment associated with diesel oil contamination in tropical coastal habitats. Prediction of impacts is generally conducted via environmental monitoring, in which environmental quality over time and space is assessed by repeated observations. Prediction of risk is included within the risk ...

Small rodents are some of the most important elements of boreal/arctic food webs, where they play essential functional roles. Their population dynamics are characterized by large amplitude multi-annual cycles regulated by direct and delayed density-dependence. These drastic variations in abundance have deep cascading effects into the whole ecosystem. Hence, the study boreal rodent population processes ...

This thesis focuses on how absorption properties of molecules are influenced by their environment and how this can be calculated accurately. Calculations have been performed with a polarizable embedding (PE) multiscale model. The environment is described classically by charges and electric multipoles for the permanent electrostatics and polarizabilities for polarization interactions. Density-functional ...

This thesis is concerned with a symmetry classification problem for ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that dates back to Sophus Lie. We focus on higher order ODEs, i.e. scalar ODEs of order greater than or equal to 4 or vector ODEs of order greater than or equal to 3, up to contact transformations. The maximal contact symmetry algebra dimensions for these ODEs are known. We determine for ...

A special case of population fluctuation is multi-annual population cycles. While such population cycles exist in several ecosystems, they are more prominent in northern (e.g.tundra) ecosystems, especially among key stone herbivore species. These herbivores providean important ecosystem function in the sense of pulsed flows of resources (i.e. for predators) and disturbances (i.e. for vegetation) ...

What causes the escape of natural gases to the seafloor and how significant this escape has been along the mid-Norwegian continental margin? These are questions that guided the doctoral thesis. The thesis is part of a research project supported by the European Commission and the Norwegian Research Council, which aims at quantifying geological processes that control fluid flow and gas hydrate formation ...

MapReduce has become a widely employed programming model for large-scale data-intensive computations. Traditional MapReduce engines employ dynamic routing of data as a core mechanism for fault tolerance and load balancing. An alternative mechanism is static routing, which reduces the need to store temporary copies of intermediate data, but requires a tighter coupling between the components for ...