Monitoring floating marine litter in the White, Barents and Kara Seas

Monitoring floating marine litter in the White, Barents and Kara Seas

3 May 2021 news

Akvaplan-niva is leading the MALINOR project, aiming to map areas of marine litter and describe its characteristics in the Norwegian, Barents, Kara seas and the High Arctic with a multi-disciplinary approach in collaboration between Norwegian and Russian institutions. Last summer one project partner, Zubov State Oceanographic Institute (SOI), has collected important data for the project.

Senior scientist at the SOI Maria Pogojeva, participated in a research cruise to test methods for monitoring floating marine macro debris. The expedition with the vessel RV Ivan Petrov covered the White, Barents and Kara seas. A visual registration of floating objects > 2.5 cm was carried out along the vessels route. All encountered debris was recorded using a specially developed EC Joint Research Center cell phone application and paper protocols with GPS coordinates to the identified debris objects.

Photo: Maria Pogojeva

The studies made it possible to evaluate the operation of the cell phone app, understand the specifics of observations in high latitudes and to work out other possible options for collecting data. The new information was obtained as a result of this summer expedition will supplemented data previously collected in the Barents Sea under the Transarctic-2019 programme.

Photo: The expedition with RV Ivan Petrov covered the White, Barents and Kara seas

MALINOR - Mapping marine litter in the Norwegian and Russian Arctic Seas is a bilateral research project funded by the NORRUSS programme of the Research Council of Norway.

Norwegian partners in the project are Akvaplan-niva (lead by Lionel Camus), SALT, Maritime Robotics, UNIS, NILU, GRID-Arendal, the Meteorological Institute, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway and TerraNor. The Russian partners are MMBI RAS, SOI, the Association Maritime Heritage and the WWF Barents Sea Office.

More information about MALINOR: https://www.akvaplan.niva.no/e...

  • Senior Scientist / Manager Digital Solutions