Project Isfjorden

Read Time:3 Minute, 44 Second

The hundreds of volunteers who spent their days and weekends last summer clearing beaches near Longyearbyen of trash are likely to most remember the huge rusting oil barrels and other large items that dominated muscle and mass during the pickups. But researchers spending months afterward analyzing debris are far more interested in the tiny bots collected from tiny areas cleaned by those volunteers.

Both groups are being credited with making significant environmental contributions to Project Isfjorden, in ways as different as their results.

About Post Author

Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.

marksabbatini@yahoo.com

http://icepeople.net

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Read Time:5 Minute, 22 Second

Several meters away from a large square of crude log benches were more than a dozen intact and shattered wine bottles were loosely grouped, two large sets of reindeer antlers were hopelessly snarled by a torn section of fishnet at one end and an far more tortuous snarl of steel cords at the other.

The debris’ fatal presence didn’t end with the reindeer who, like many other larger sea and land wildlife, were slowly starved of food, oxygen or some other life necessity. Kai Müller, a volunteer helping to clean the beach where the antlers were found, got metallic slivers in his eyes while carrying it on his shoulder – the kind of tiny fragments that kill multitudes of birds, fish and other small animals.