Tag: Norway

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2012) — Until now, it was presumed that the last glacial period denuded the Scandinavian landscape of trees until a gradual return of milder weather began and melted away the ice cover some 9000 years ago. That perspective is now disproved by research headed by Professor Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Laura Parducci from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and Inger Greve Alsos from Tromsø University Museum, Norway.
Their research teams show that some Scandinavian conifers survived the inhospitable ice age climate likely for several thousands of years. The result is to be published in the scientific journal Science.

A week ago Norwegian authorities filed further charges against Krekar for making death threats against a politician, after years of attempts to remove him from the country.

In this report he admits to training suicide bombers and founding militant Islamic groups. After the attacks this has intensified: is Norway a shelter for extremism?

Norway striker John Carew has recovered from a neck injury and will be fit to face Scotland at Hampden on Saturday.

Fellow forwards Steffen Iversen and Thorstein Helstad and midfielders Tom Hogli and Bjorn Helge Riise all remain fitness doubts for the visitors.

Scotland are missing Rangers striker Kenny Miller, who suffered a recurrence of a hamstring injury on Sunday.

PITSBERGEN, Norway -- The polar bear is 3 years old and hungry. Ursus maritimus has spent two years with his mother, and now on his own, he prowls the shoreline of an Arctic island, his fur the yellow-white of summer. He is vulnerable to the appetites of older and larger bears; this first year on his own may be the most treacherous in his life.

We watch from our ship's deck as he strides, his huge front paws landing surely on shoreline scree. He's not 100 yards off the bow of the National Geographic Endeavour, where our cameras are clicking so furiously it sounds like cicadas on a summer's night.

It is a summer's night, but at 79 degrees North latitude, the season is rendered in pewter, silver, gray and white, edged with shocking turquoise from light bouncing among compressed ice crystals in glaciers and floating bergs.

As our ship pushes through pack ice into a white wilderness, we enter a land where glaciers have retreated but never disappeared. We are looking at the planet as it was 10,000 years ago, gouged and worn by the great moving rivers of ice. We'll spend a week exploring the High Arctic around the archipelago of Svalbard, where Spitsbergen is located, then sail for another week through the spectacular Norwegian fjords that were carved, polished and abandoned by that same ice.