The scope of this PhD thesis is twofold: Firstly, processes, patterns and timing of the last deglaciation in the Barents Sea are reconstructed and secondly, depositional conditions on the Barents shelf during Holocene are elucidated. This cumulative PhD thesis encompasses an introductory part and five papers - three as first-author and two as co-author. Three papers are focused on the most prominent ...

The motivation behind this thesis has been to study particle precipitation from the Sun into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and its effects on selected ionospheric phenomena. Particles from the solar wind can enter the Earth's magnetosphere through magnetic merging, either at the sub-solar point, or at higher latitudes, depending on the configuration of the interplanetary magnetic field. This interaction ...

<p>World demand for energy leads industry to harvest energy in complex environment with harsh conditions and sensitive areas, such as the Arctic region – one of the last remaining wild places in the world – with potentially harmful consequences. Moreover, over the past few decades, the increasing trend of melting sea ice in the Arctic has provided increased access and has created new opportunities ...

The Arctic Ocean in general and the Barents Sea specifically, are highly affected by the human induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and increasing temperatures. Atlantification, caused by an increase in warm Atlantic Water inflow, and polar amplification, caused by a higher impact of the increasing temperatures at high latitudes, have already been observed. Moreover, the Barents Sea has been ...

The overall aim of the thesis was to study immunological effects of pollutants in Barents Sea. The Glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus), black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) and Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) were studied. The apex predatory glaucous gull have high levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), while the fish eating black-legged kittiwake and Atlantic puffin are located ...

The amount of computational resources available on the Internet is increasing. Effectively using these resources for distributed computations is challenging. An infrastructure called computational grids provides tools for structuring and deploying large-scale distributed computations on the Internet. One of the key problems in computational grids is managing the available computational resources; ...

A ship travelling in sub-freezing conditions may encounter sea spray, rain, fog or snow freezing onto various parts of it. Such ship icing is a well-known threat for those individuals who have served on ships operating in a cold marine climate. As de-icing techniques may be energy consuming, accurate prediction of icing is also desirable from a financial point of view. Throughout the last 60 years ...

Accurate predictions of free energies and the corresponding enthalpies and entropies from computer simulations are invaluable for understanding enzymatic catalysis and drug actions in terms of actual structure activity relationships. To facilitate the management and handling of the enormous amount of data generated when calculating thermodynamic parameters, we have developed a high-throughput interface ...

This thesis addresses negotiation of bindings in QoS aware open systems and in particular how to characterize possible contracts, requirements and capabilities of heterogeneous environments. Our approach is (1) to use trading of policies as the principle for negotiation and (2) the use of declared or rule-based conformance for QoS statements to be used in negotiation and (3) a middleware binding ...