Author: nilsolav

Emeritus Professor Olav Eldholm, passed away April 18 2022 at the age of 80. 

Eldholm was elected member of Academia Europaea since 1990, and a prominent person in the international geoscience community. He was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and a number of several national and international academies. Eldholm studied geophysics at the University of Bergen, and spent formative years as research scientist at Columbia University´s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York before returning to Norway for a professorship at the University of Oslo in 1974.

At that time Lamont-Doherty was arguably the global hothouse for marine geoscience, and Eldholm soon became an important member of the global community in the field with key collaborators. Most influential was perhaps his collaboration with Manik Talwani, which also resulted in the prominent monograph Evolution of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea in 1971.

Eldholm was widely known internationally for his significant contributions to marine geophysics and geodynamics, notably to the understanding of continental margins, ocean basins, volcanism and plate tectonics –in particular in the North Atlantic region. In 2021 an ancient volcano on the Vøring Plateau was named Eldhø to honour his contributions to science. His research has also been highly influential for oil and gas exploration and production on the Norwegian Continental Shelf not least with many of his students moving to central positions in the industry.

Eldholm was a key person in international programmes in marine Earth Science, and he was for many years deeply involved as a leading figure in the Ocean Drilling Program, where he was a keen promotor of getting young scientists involved in this major global scientific undertaking. This has shaped many excellent scientific careers.

In 2003 Eldholm moved back to his Alma Mater in Bergen to become head of the newly merged Department of Earth Science at the University of Bergen which he led as a dynamic leader for six years before retiring to become an emeritus professor. He was an active emeritus and continued with producing new scientific publications. His legacy is important and many in the national and international marine geoscience community will miss him as an interested and inspiring colleague.

Eystein Jansen

The annual report of the AE-Bergen Knowledge Hub is now available to download. The report shows a very active year for our Hub despite the many covid restrictions.

The annual report can be downloaded here.

For the AE-Bergen Knowledge Hub 2021 has been an important year as Academia Europaea (AE) and the University of Bergen (UiB) in May 2021 renewed their agreement stating that UiB will host and provide facilities and personnel for the running of our Hub for the next four years. Furthermore, our Strategic Plan 2021-2024 was approved by our Advisory Board. In 2021 UiB’s current rector professor Margareth Hagen replaced previous rector Dag Rune Olsen as chair of our Hub’s Advisory Board.

In addition to our own regional and local initiatives and activities in 2021, we have also handled several tasks for AE in general, providing technical and administrative support for the online Class A2 meeting and a joint A1/A2 Class meeting. We have also facilitated running of the “Academia Europaea Task Force on Environment, climate and sustainability”, a committee under the leadership of Professor Verena Winiwarter with members from all classes, set up to provide suggestions for extending AE’s engagement and visibility in these fields.

Academic Director Eystein Jansen writes in his introduction to the annual report:

«I am grateful for our good collaboration within the Academy, its Hubs, The Graz office, the central London Office, and the Board. I will pay a special tribute to our past president Sierd Cloetingh for his strong support for our work and encouragement in terms of extending our role and wish our new president Marja Makarow welcome, whom we already have a very good relationship with through her former role in our Advisory Board. »

 

 

Professor of medical virology and head of the Influenza Centre in Bergen, Rebecca Cox, was recently awarded the Meltzer 2022 Award for excellent science communication. 

Rebecca Cox has been remarkably visible during the pandemic and during the vaccine rollout, with more than 130 interviews in newspapers and TV during 2020. However, as the Meltzer jury points out, she also contributed to 140 scientific publications, 53 of them the last five years, in leading journals such as Lancet Infectious Diseases, Lancet Europe, Nature Immunology and Nature Medicine.

Read more about the award in the magazine Khrono (in norwegian). 

Professor Rebecca Cox was an expert consultant for the Independent Expert Report “Improving pandemic preparedness and management”, commissioned by the EU. She was nominated by the Academia Europaea Bergen Knowledge Hub (AE-Bergen) for the role.

Read more about her work on the report here.

 

The Academia Europaea strongly supports the European Union member states, Switzerland, The United Kingdom and the EEA countries’ action against Russia’s belligerent attack on Ukraine, which is in violation of international law. We are following the positions of our partner Academies across Europe.

A statement of the Board of Trustees of the Academia Europaea

 

We are honoured to express our solidarity with all Ukrainian scholars of all disciplines, including our own members and non-members.

The Academia Europaea regards the Russian invasion as an attack on the fundamental values of freedom, democracy and self-determination, which in turn provide the basis for academic freedom and opportunities for academic cooperation.

The Academia Europaea members, are all distinguished international scholars. They have been elected because of their international status in the Sciences, the Humanities and the Social and Societal Sciences, as judged by their European colleagues and peers across our continent. We are proud to include members from the Ukraine and from the Russian Federation on equal terms. Science and scholarship thrive on open dialogue and collaboration. We are therefore especially saddened by this unprovoked action by the Russian government against the Ukraine, which seeks to destroy what we stand for – open dialogue and collaboration of equals. As an organisation, we have always maintained diverse and productive academic collaborations with all our members, from all European countries and we certainly will seek to continue this.

The Academia Europaea is aware of the consequences of this military action and at the same time deeply regrets the impact it will have on freedoms, including academic freedoms. We live in a multidimensional world, and only by means of close international academic cooperation can the crises facing humanity, such as climate change, species extinction or infectious diseases, be overcome. For this reason, our solidarity also goes out to our long-standing Russian members who are themselves now the innocent victims of the Russian regime’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Academia Europaea has noted the statements issued by many other European National Academies and Scientific Organisations and we will continue to respond in concert with them. We are especially pleased to see and wish to thank unreservedly, those organisations with the capabilities, that are putting into place schemes to provide safe havens and funds for Ukrainian researchers. We applaud your efforts.

The statement authorised for publication on 1 March 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Academia Europaea can be downloaded from the AE website.

 

Midway through the “biodegradable plastics breakdown” experiment at Bergen Aquarium, Norway, led by NORCE scientist Gunhild Bødtker, important and surprising discoveries are already coming to light.

Gunhild Bødtker is a working group member and an author on the SAPEA report Biodegradability of plastics in the open environment. Following the publication of the report, Dr Bødtker set up an experiment at the Bergen Aquarium. In a tank at the aquarium, she is studying how long it takes for some specific kinds of biodegradable plastics to break down fully in a marine environment similar to the sea near Bergen in Norway.

She is also studying which microbes are involved, and whether the location of the samples makes any difference: some samples are in the water column, while others are on a sediment simulating the seafloor. The experiment has been running since summer 2021.

– You’ve been engaged in the biodegradability of plastics even before you took part in the working group of the SAPEA report?

– That’s correct. Many of the smaller islands on the western coast of Norway have an alarming amount of plastics pollution. We’ve had several projects at NORCE documenting this. Some of this work can be seen in the Norwegian documentary series “Plasthavet”, where some heavily polluted smaller islands also are being cleaned up by volunteers.

– I was interested in the biodegradability of conventional plastics before, knowing that biodegradability would be very slow. Looking at plastics produced to be biodegradable became more of a focus when I was working on the SAPEA report.

Different types of biodegradable plastics

In her experiment at the Bergen Aquarium, Gunhild Bødtker is studying the biodegradability of two different types of biodegradable plastics, compared to one positive and one negative control material. In addition, she is comparing how fast the materials biodegrade on the “seafloor” of the tank compared to materials floating freely in the tank. After 125 days, midway through the experiment, she’s already seeing some surprising results.

– We’ve seen a much faster biodegradation of the Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) variant of biodegradable plastics than we expected. We’ve also seen that our positive control material, which was made from cellulose, has completely disappeared. This indicates a healthy presence of microorganisms contributing to the biodegradation of these types of material in Norwegian sea water.

Recent updates and comprehensive information about the experiment can be found on the website Built2biodegrade.  

Findings on water temperature

– From our results so far, we have a clear indication that water temperature isn’t as essential to biodegradation rates in seawater as previously thought. It was commonly held that warmer waters, like the South Asian waters, would speed up biodegradation rates. From our results, it seems that the types of microorganisms present, in combination with other environmental factors, are more important.

Gunhild Bødtker is careful to emphasize that even though the results of the Bergen experiment suggest that temperature may not be the main factor determining environmental degradation rates of biodegradable plastics, more emphasis should be put on the combination of environmental factors within habitats and climate zones, as well as material type and sample history.

The experiment is a pilot study and Gunhild Bødtker hopes to set up a control experiment. Findings from the pilot study are already quite significant, particularly the findings on water temperature.      

Another result of the experiment is that materials biodegraded at a faster rate on  “sea floor” sediment than materials floating freely in the tank. This is in line with previous findings.

Dr Bødtker wants to be very clear that whatever conclusions are drawn from the experiment, littering is not acceptable, even with products made from biodegradable plastics.

– We know that certain products have a higher risk of ending up in the sea, such as fishing equipment. If some of these are made from biodegradable plastics, that might have an effect. But biodegradable plastics shouldn’t be an excuse for littering.

The Bergen experiment test pure polymers, while products made from these polymers will usually have added materials. The added materials will also need to be biodegradable if future biodegradability-certification processes are considered.

She is now in the process of seeking funding for the next phase of the experiment. Bødtker says,

– It will be interesting to see how a different type of “seafloor” in the tank affects the biodegradation rate. Also, for the next experiment, it will be interesting to test actual products rather than just pure polymers.

In the latest update from the experiment, Bødtker and collaborators report that the biodegradation rate of PHB on the “seafloor” sediment of the Bergen Aquarium tank (11-12 degrees Celsius) is similar to what was previously observed onSE Asian marine sediment (29 degrees Celsius).

Experiment presented during One Ocean Expedition

Dr Bødtker has recently taken part in the One Ocean Expedition, where the Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl is circumnavigating the globe. From August 2021 to April 2023, Statsraad Lehmkuhl is sailing 55,000 nautical miles and visit 36 ports worldwide. Gunhild Bødtker participated on the Miami-New York leg of the expedition just before Christmas. Statsraad Lehmkuhl serves as a floating university and training vessel combined, with University of Bergen as a major contributor. The leg Dr. Bødtker sailed had a special focus on science.

– We had a lot of interesting feedback when the experiment was presented on the One Ocean Expedition. For instance, many participants in the expedition were surprised to discover that bioplastics and biodegradable plastics are not the same thing, Bødtker says.

– This is an important research field. For me personally, it was quite an awakening that even though we were in the open sea, we could see plastics the water, emphasizing the need for more research and more sustainable solutions.   

– The Academy’s community, with its network of Regional Knowledge Hubs, has the authority, credibility, and pan-European breadth to deliver independent and unbiased collective expertise and advice for policymakers. Academia Europaea, together with SAPEA and the Young Academies, is indeed excellently placed to continue to play a fundamental role in delivering science advice at a European level, says the new President of Academia Europaea, Professor Marja Makarow.

Her first interview as President was conducted by the AE Cardiff Hub.

In the interview, you’ll find information about Makarows background, her reflections on science advice and supporting the next generation of researchers and scientists, as well as a recording of her talk at Academia Europaea’s annual conference in October 2021.

Click here for the complete interview.