Due to climate change, decreasing ice cover and increasing industrial activities, Arctic marine ecosystems are expected to face higher levels of anthropogenic stress. To sustain healthy and productive ocean ecosystems, it is imperative to build baseline data to assess future changes. Herein, a natural oil seep site offshore western Svalbard (Prins Karls Forland, PKF, 80–100 m water depth), discovered ...

The Arctic continental shelves are important reservoirs of methane stored in gas hydrates and deeper geological formations. However, little is known about methane dynamics in deeper oceanic settings such as mid-ocean ridges, mainly due to operational challenges related to their remoteness. This study investigates a recently discovered methane seepage environment at Svyatogor Ridge, a sediment-covered ...

Cold-seep systems have a unique geo-ecological significance in the deep-sea environment. They impact the variability of present-day submarine sedimentary environments, affecting the evolution of the landscape over time and creating a variety of submarine landforms, one of which is Mud Volcanoes (MVs). MVs are submarine landforms form due extrusion of mud, fluids, and gas, mainly methane, from deeper ...

Was something lost as society moved away from “traditional” media such as handwritten letters and photography and into the digital age? Some of the authors remember this age fondly, and we wanted to see if this fondness could be translated into a science dialogue project with school classes. We designed and carried out a communication process with four classes at different schools across Europe. ...

Evidence of hydrothermal venting on the ultra-slow spreading Gakkel Ridge in the Central Arctic Ocean has been available since 2001, with first visual evidence of black smokers on the Aurora Vent Field obtained in 2014. But it was not until 2021 that the first ever remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dives to hydrothermal vents under permanent ice cover in the Arctic were conducted, enabling the ...

Methane-consuming microbes inhabiting marine methane seeps have recently been found to have the capacity to assimilate inorganic nitrogen, suggesting a previously unaccounted role in the global nitrogen cycle. Despite ex-situ experimental observations, definitive evidence of this process under in-situ conditions remains elusive, hindering the complete understanding of the controlling factors and ...

Messinian pre-evaporitic seep carbonates outcropping in the Tuscan-Romagna area share a common upward stratigraphic trend: massive seep carbonates rich in large lucinids, modiolids and planktonic foraminifera pass upward to horizontally laminated carbonates free of macrofauna and foraminifera. A transitional macrofauna-free facies marks the passage in some sections, sometimes with faint lamination. ...