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 ...

In modern environments, pore water geochemistry and modelling simulations allow the study of methane (CH₄) sources and sinks at any geographic location. However, reconstructing CH₄ dynamics in geological records is challenging. Here, we show that the benthic foraminiferal δ³⁴S can be used to reconstruct the fux (i.e., difusive vs. advective) and timing of CH₄ ...

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 ...

Present-day activity of cold-seeps in the ocean is evident from direct observations of methane emanating from the seafloor, the presence of chemosynthetic organisms, or the quantification of gas concentrations in the water column and pore water solutes. Verifying past cold seep activity and biogeochemical characteristics is more challenging but may be reconstructed from proxy records of authigenic ...

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 ...

Several foraminifera are deposit feeders that consume organic detritus (dead particulate organic material with entrained bacteria). However, the role of such foraminifera in the benthic food web remains understudied. Foraminifera feeding on methanotrophic bacteria, which are 13C-depleted, may cause negative cytoplasmic and/or calcitic δ13C values. To test whether the foraminiferal diet includes ...

Methane emissions from Arctic continental margins are increasing due to the negative effect of global warming on ice sheet and permafrost stability, but dynamics and timescales of seafloor seepage still remain poorly constrained. Here, we examine sediment cores collected from an active seepage area located between 295 and 353 m water depth in the SW Barents Sea, at Leirdjupet Fault Complex. The ...

Paleoceanographic investigations in the Arctic and north Atlantic are crucial to understanding past and current climate change, in particular considering amounts of pressure-temperature sensitive gas stored in marine sediments of the region. Many paleoceanographic studies are based on foraminiferal oxygen and carbon stable isotope compositions (δ¹⁸O, δ¹³C) from either planktonic ...

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. ...