Introduction to the special issue on polar night studies conducted onboard RV Helmer Hanssen in the Svalbard area

Abstract

Polar night studies at high latitudes have during the last years become a major research focus for ARCTOS researchers, spearheaded by research cruises lead by UiT and MSc/PhD courses lead by UNIS. During the last 4 years, the RV Helmer Hanssen have been assigned to conduct research well into the nautical polar night (Berge et al. in press), a temporal and spatial part of the Arctic Ocean that until now have remained more or less unstudied. For a long time, ice-covered areas of the Arctic were presumed to be unproductive and early scientific studies in the Arctic generally supported this paradigm (Nansen 1902). Evidence of human settlements in the high Arctic over several thousand years, however, conflicted with these early observations and constituted a paradox as to how human populations could subsist in regions considered to be biological deserts. Further investigations revealed the existence of productivity hot spots on par with some of the most productive places on earth and provided the first indications of complexity and the importance of the links between ice, ocean, and land in Arctic ecosystems. During the last 20 years, culminating with the third International Polar Year (IPY 2007–2009), however, national and international research efforts in the Arctic have sharply increased. This increase in attention and research efforts are paralleled by an increased awareness of both the fisheries and petroleum resources available at high latitudes as well as new shipping routes emerging following a reduction of the Arctic ice cover (see e.g. Barber et al. in press). Despite the fact that attention, awareness and research efforts have increased, there are still major and fundamental gaps in knowledge, preventing a holistic understanding of the Arctic as a single, linked system undergoing unprecedented change and in an earth science perspective. Perhaps the most obvious and largest of these known gaps is centred around the widely accepted paradigm that Arctic marine ecosystems are best compared with a marine desert during the long and dark polar night. Just as the paradigm of the Arctic Ocean being an unproductive biotope was refuted a hundred years ago, the prevailing view of the polar night as devoid of biological activity has recently been challenged (Berge et al. in press for a review).