North Of Sweden Research Articles

The ethics and politics of world heritage: local application at the site of Laponia

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of world heritage (WH) through a cosmopolitan lens. It proposes that cosmopolitanism provides fertile ground for the study of WH, in particular if combined with sensitivity to distinct indigenous ethical and political claims. Underpinning my article is the question of whether the politics of WH, despite its peaceful and universalist intensions, obscures local disputes and subaltern voices. The empirical emphasis is placed on the WH site of Laponia in the North of Sweden – a location of Sami indigenous communities and commercial mining interests. I provide a narrative analysis of the inconsistencies between the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative defined by support for human and indigenous rights globally and the protection ambition of WH and its generally favourable attitude towards mining, despite its potentially damaging effects on the WH site of Laponia and the cultural heritage and land rights of Sami people living there. My study also provides an analysis of Sami narratives on Laponia – storylines that are rarely included in the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative. The study seeks to contribute to scholarly understandings of indigenous peoples’ ability to lay claims to the cosmopolitan protection logic that prevails in WH.

Unsupervised Machine Learning for Missing Clamp Detection from an In-Service Train Using Differential Eddy Current Sensor

The rail fastening system plays a crucial role in railway tracks as it ensures operational safety by fixing the rail on to the sleeper. Early detection of rail fastener system defects is crucial to ensure track safety and to enable maintenance optimization. Fastener inspections are normally conducted either manually by trained maintenance personnel or by using automated 2-D visual inspection methods. Such methods have drawbacks when visibility is limited, and they are also found to be expensive in terms of system maintenance cost and track possession time. In a previous study, the authors proposed a train-based differential eddy current sensor system based on the principle of electromagnetic induction for fastener inspection that could overcome the challenges mentioned above. The detection in the previous study was carried out with the aid of a supervised machine learning algorithm. This study reports the finding of a case study, along a heavy haul line in the north of Sweden, using the same eddy current sensor system mounted on an in-service freight train. In this study, unsupervised machine learning models for detecting and analyzing missing clamps in a fastener system were developed. The differential eddy current measurement system was set to use a driving field frequency of 27 kHz. An anomaly detection model combining isolation forest (IF) and connectivity-based outlier factor (COF) was implemented to detect anomalies from fastener inspection measurements. To group the anomalies into meaningful clusters and to detect missing clamps within the fastening system, an unsupervised clustering based on the DBSCAN algorithm was also implemented. The models were verified by measuring a section of the track for which the track conditions were known. The proposed anomaly detection model had a detection accuracy of 96.79% and also exhibited a high score of sensitivity and specificity. The DBSCAN model was successful in clustering missing clamps, both one and two missing clamps, from a fastening system separately.

The Sense of a Land – Two photographic encounters with the Nordic North through Walter Benjamin’s notion of history in now-time

This article explores two works by Swedish artists Emanuel Cederqvist and Henrik Andersson that relate to the vast alpine areas of Norrland in the far north of Sweden. In both works, the artists relate their experiences of the area as it exists today as well as the layers of its history through both archival material and their own photographs. More specifically, both artists use material that show how the area was becoming an increaingly popular destination for researchers, explorers, and tourists in the beginning of the last century. Other archival material reveal aspects of military and colonial history as well as the history of the Sámi populations of the region. In the article, I explore these works and the multi-layered histories that they relate to with the help of Walter Benjamin’s version of historical materialism, in which history is approached through images in the present, rather than a narrative of events structured in chronological order. From this perspective, the history of the area is engaged with as physical and emotional, as well as cognitive, experiences, taking place in what Benjamin refers to as now-time, with associations that take off in many different directions.

An intellectual’s life strategies in the time of war and under dictatorship in the novels by Eyvind Johnson

The article examines conceptual and artistic issues of the most seminal novels written by Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976), one of the most renowned Swedish writers of the 20th century. Johnson, born in the north of Sweden, was of low origin, and he started his career as an amateur proletarian writer, a typical representative of the Swedish “proletarian literature,” a movement that was largely instrumental in shaping the form and substance of prose fiction in Sweden in the first half of the last century. His obligatory education ended at the age of fourteen, but his insatiable yearning for self-education, books, foreign languages, as well as his broad and hard-earned experience, gradually made him one of the most erudite and intellectually intricate Swedish novelists of the last century. From the 1940s on, the writer had gone far beyond the borders of “proletarian literature” and created works that won him international acclaim and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1974. Yet, the works of this humanitarian writer, who kept condemning totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, are practically unknown in our country, in translations of his novels and research papers. This article analyzes the cycles on Ulof and Krilon, which are devoted to Sweden, and written after the Second World War: the novels The Surge of the Shores, Dreams of Roses and Fire, and The Days of His Grace are based on subjects of the classical literature and the events of the European history. The object of our study is protagonists in the above-mentioned works. The subject of the research is the evolution of the types and images of humanitarian intellectuals in their clashes with authoritarian power, dictatorship and war. The article focuses on characters who, when placed in such condition, have to make up their minds and choose a life strategy which would conform with Johnson’s ethical and philosophical position, and on the evolution of describing circumstances and results of these choices throughout the whole life of the writer.

David Vikgren versus Antti Keksi

David Vikgren Versus Antti Keksi: The Work of Orature in Phonemic poetry
 David Vikgren (1975–) has made a phonemic elaboration of an oral poem by Antti Keksi (1677). Both these poets are situated in Torne Valley in the very north of Sweden. This region was colonised for centuries. For example, the language Meänkieli was forbidden in schools. Nowadays, efforts are made to restore Meänkieli, so David Vikgren’s phonemic work with Keksi’s oral poem has political implications. However, this is also an interesting piece of language materialism, where Vikgren treats the Meänkieli text according to three principles, as antonym, as anagram, and as homophony. This article suggests a method for the signification process of homophony. The semantic meaning of words changes considerably when phonemes are allowed to dominate and reading finds its base in sound associations.

Soil chemistry, temperature and bacterial community composition drive brGDGT distributions along a subarctic elevation gradient

Branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) are bacterial membrane lipids which can be used to reconstruct past terrestrial mean annual air temperature (MAAT) and soil pH values. To reconstruct these environmental conditions in geological archives, we make use of the brGDGT ratios MBTʹ5ME, CBTʹ and IR, which summarize the structural variation in brGDGT lipids. However, the most recent calibrations between the brGDGT-based temperature proxy MBTʹ5ME and temperature on a global scale are characterized by a residual error between 3.8 °C and 6.0 °C. This lack of accuracy of the MBTʹ5ME-MAAT calibration is often attributed to the difference between soil and atmospheric temperatures. Also, previous studies suggested that the variation of the MBTʹ5ME along chemistry and temperature gradients reflects a possible influence of bacterial community changes. Here, we analyzed the effect environmental variables have on brGDGT signatures collected along five elevation gradients in the north of Sweden and Norway, where MAAT changed between –4.7 °C and 2.7 °C and soil pH varies between 3.3 and 5.7. Specifically, we determined the impact of air and soil temperature, the bacterial community composition and soil chemical characteristics. The range of MBTʹ5ME values encountered (0.30–0.70) results in a wide range of reconstructed temperatures (1–13 °C). The use of in situ soil temperature data spanning one year did not improve the correlation with brGDGT MBTʹ5ME values, compared to using a long-term MAAT dataset. Although a temperature gradient was present, soil chemistry apparently determined brGDGTs concentration and distribution on this local scale. Specifically, soils with high cation exchange capacity (CEC) showed an increased concentration of brGDGT Ia, resulting in increased Community Index (CI) and MBTʹ5ME values, both brGDGT ratios that reflect the degree of methylation. Soils with increased pH (pH range 5–6) had a distinct brGDGT fingerprint with generally decreased MBTʹ5ME values, which resulted in the correlation between MBTʹ5ME and soil pH (r = –0.60, p < 0.01). Contrary to expectations, pH was a better predictor of MBTʹ5ME values than temperature (r = 0.47, r = 0. 44, p < 0.01, with MAAT and mean summer soil temperature (MSST), respectively). Soil pH also shaped the bacterial community composition, and a bio-indicator approach was used to narrow down the proposed bacterial producer of brGDGT lipids in high CI (Acidobacteria subgroups 1 and 3) and high pH soils (Acidobacteria subgroups 6 and 7). Building upon previous research, this confirms that brGDGTs respond to similar changes in bacterial community composition across sites. Because of the interplay between temperature and soil chemistry, the relationship between the MBTʹ5ME and soil temperature is clearly complex at the local scale. Further disentangling these environmental drivers is still essential in the development of the MBTʹ5ME proxy as paleothermometer.

Calling large indels in 1047 Arabidopsis with IndelEnsembler.

Large indels greatly impact the observable phenotypes in different organisms including plants and human. Hence, extracting large indels with high precision and sensitivity is important. Here, we developed IndelEnsembler to detect large indels in 1047 Arabidopsis whole-genome sequencing data. IndelEnsembler identified 34 093 deletions, 12 913 tandem duplications and 9773 insertions. Our large indel dataset was more comprehensive and accurate compared with the previous dataset of AthCNV (1). We captured nearly twice of the ground truth deletions and on average 27% more ground truth duplications compared with AthCNV, though our dataset has less number of large indels compared with AthCNV. Our large indels were positively correlated with transposon elements across the Arabidopsis genome. The non-homologous recombination events were the major formation mechanism of deletions in Arabidopsis genome. The Neighbor joining (NJ) tree constructed based on IndelEnsembler's deletions clearly divided the geographic subgroups of 1047 Arabidopsis. More importantly, our large indels represent a previously unassessed source of genetic variation. Approximately 49% of the deletions have low linkage disequilibrium (LD) with surrounding single nucleotide polymorphisms. Some of them could affect trait performance. For instance, using deletion-based genome-wide association study (DEL-GWAS), the accessions containing a 182-bp deletion in AT1G11520 had delayed flowering time and all accessions in north Sweden had the 182-bp deletion. We also found the accessions with 65-bp deletion in the first exon of AT4G00650 (FRI) flowered earlier than those without it. These two deletions cannot be detected in AthCNV and, interestingly, they do not co-occur in any Arabidopsis thaliana accession. By SNP-GWAS, surrounding SNPs of these two deletions do not correlate with flowering time. This example demonstrated that existing large indel datasets miss phenotypic variations and our large indel dataset filled in the gap.

Rural Resilience and Voluntary Work in the North of Sweden

Rural areas in the north of Sweden are characterized by depopulation, unemployment and undermined social services. Due to the demands of economic growth and development, major cities in southern Sweden have been prioritized at the expense of the countryside. However, there have been many reactions to the dismantling of the welfare society in rural areas. People are also trying to counter and compensate for the impoverishment of the countryside through voluntary work. The overarching aim of this paper is to explore meanings of voluntary work in Sweden’s northern county of Västerbotten. More specifically, the aim is to investigate how different comprehensions of rural voluntary work are related to rural identities and to a resilient rural society. A central argument in the paper is that the relation between rural volunteer work and rural resilience is ambiguous. On one hand, volunteer work can contribute to rural resilience, since volunteering is a necessary course of action for people in the countryside to secure a necessary level of social services. On the other hand, rural volunteer work often has a traditional character, not always representing the capital of knowledge needed to maintain a sustainable rural lifestyle in the long run.

Survival and growth of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) seedlings in north Sweden: effects of planting position and arginine phosphate addition

ABSTRACT Forest regeneration by tree planting on harvested sites in the boreal forests of northern Europe is frequently preceded by site preparation to increase survival and growth of the seedlings. We studied whether a small addition of arginine phosphate (AP treatment) at the time of planting would further enhance the seedlings’ early performance. Following two growth seasons, we investigated survival and growth of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) seedlings on 11 locations between latitudes 61.1°N and 67.1°N in the boreal forest of northern Sweden. The planting positions of seedlings were on capped mounds and bare mineral soil following mechanical site preparation, and in non-prepared soil. We found that seedling survival following site preparation increased with AP treatment. On capped mounds, seedling survival was more variable and appeared more dependent on precipitation during the first month after planting than seedlings positioned in the mineral soil. The positive effect of AP treatment on seedling growth differed between sites and was more pronounced on sites with longer growing seasons. AP treatment had no significant effect on survival of seedlings planted in non-prepared soil, while the positive effect on growth was more pronounced at sites with higher fertility using this planting position.

Sámi children as thought herders: philosophy of death and storytelling as radical hope in early childhood education

This article follows a story played out by children at a Sámi early childhood centre in north Sweden. It does so by reflecting on the children’s story as a form of Critical Indigenous Philosophy. In particular it explores what it could mean for a child to be a philosopher in a Sámi context by developing the concept of jurddavázzi, or thought herder, in conversation with Wittgenstein’s method of ‘leading’, and Cavell’s of ‘shepherding’, ‘words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’. The children’s play story – involving themes of death, struggles with natural surroundings, and interconnectivity through seeing life in nature – is read in relation to questions about traditional stories raised in the poetry of the Sámi poet, artist and philosopher, Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, or Áillohaš. The article ends by discussing how the children’s invitation to follow their story can be seen as a decolonizing pedagogical gesture of the child that requires a particular kind of philosophical listening by the teacher or adult. The article is in its style an attempt to demonstrate a form of philosophical storytelling the children are engaged in.

Towards (Hyper)Local Public Sphere: Comparison of Civic Engagement across the Global North

The role of hyperlocal media is of increasing relevance as traditional local journalism experiences a decline due to centralisation and consolidation. The affordances of Internet and digital technologies also enable hyperlocal initiatives to enhance civic engagement in localities and serve as a place and resource for local deliberative processes. This study examines how the aims, perceptions and practices of hyperlocal media vary in three countries of the Global North—Sweden, Finland and Russia—and what implications this has for connectedness and civic engagement in local public spheres. The context of different media systems and local political regimes help to explore possibilities and limitations of hyperlocals as agents of place-oriented civic engagement. The data includes interviews with practitioners and analysis of selected hyperlocal media. Our results indicate that hyperlocal media practitioners in all three countries aim to provide local people and communities with a voice, and to enhance resident engagement in local life. We reveal three civic roles of hyperlocal media: (i) information provider, (ii) community builder, and (iii) civic mediator. Practices of civic engagement used by hyperlocal media range from relying on civic journalism to fostering civic debates and can be classified in two main categories: civic information and civic debate and interaction. The perceptions and practices of these hyperlocal media are, to some extent, similar because of comparable changes and challenges regarding the local media and public spheres. At the same time, the perceptions of civic roles vary, reflecting both the developments and differences in the countries’ media spheres and political regimes. This research raises a critical question about hyperlocal practitioners’ understanding of their own roles and aims, and in addition, how differences in media cultures and local regimes affect their performance as agents of local public spheres.

Energy performance criteria for residential buildings: A comparison of Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian building codes

Building code are considered to be an effective policy tool to reduce energy use in buildings. In practice, national priorities influence the indicators and criteria adopted in the building codes. Consequently, neighbouring countries with similar climate conditions may use different criteria in their building codes to regulate the energy performance. In this paper, the energy performance criteria and their relative stringency in the latest residential building codes of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia are compared. The study is based on energy performance evaluations of one single-family building and one multi-family building, located in the north of Sweden. Both buildings complied with the Norwegian and Russian building code. However, the buildings did not comply with the specific fan power and heat loss criteria in the Finnish building code. Additionally, the single-family building did not comply with the specific primary energy and electric powerdemand criteria in the Swedish building code when heated by an electric heater. The national standard input data were found to have a large influence on the buildings’ compliance with the studied energy use criteria. Policy implications of the results are discussed.

Refugee women’s establishment in the rural north of Sweden: cultural capital in meeting local labour market needs

ABSTRACT This paper investigates opportunities and obstacles refugee women face in establishment in rural areas. Drawing on ethnographic research in three rural municipalities in northern Sweden, including interviews with refugee women, local employers and educational staff, I analyse the women’s space for agency and opportunities to use and capitalise on different resources in relation to the local labour market and belonging. Applying Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of cultural capital, as read by Skeggs, I show that the women can capitalise on embodied cultural capital of feminine and ethnic caregiving. However, due to lack of the ‘right’ institutional cultural capital of educational certificates from Swedish institutions, and devaluation of foreign credentials and experiences, this is mainly in difficult-to-fill, unsecure jobs in the elder care or early childhood education and care sectors. The women’s limited options and opportunities to ‘enterprise themselves up’ contribute to ethnicisation of care work in rural labour markets. Moreover, lack of mobility and key cultural capital (cars and driving licences) for work, education and belonging in both the local masculine culture of the remote rural areas and national gender equality culture further limit the women’s space for agency and establishment.

Effects of Forestry Intensification and Conservation on Green Infrastructures: A Spatio-Temporal Evaluation in Sweden

There is a rivalry between policies on intensification of forest management to meet the demands of a growing bioeconomy, and policies on green infrastructure functionality. Evaluation of the net effects of different policy instruments on real-world outcomes is crucial. First, we present data on final felling rates in wood production landscapes and stand age distribution dynamic in two case study regions, and changes in dead wood amounts in Sweden. Second, the growth of formally protected areas was compiled and changes in functional connectivity analysed in these regions, and the development of dead wood and green tree retention in Sweden was described. The case studies were the counties Dalarna and Jämtland (77,000 km2) representing an expanding frontier of boreal forest transformation. In the wood production landscape, official final felling rates averaged 0.84%/year, extending the regional timber frontier. The amount of forest &lt;60 years old increased from 27–34% in 1955 to 60–65% in 2017. The amounts of dead wood, a key forest naturalness indicator, declined from 1994 to 2016 in north Sweden, and increased in the south, albeit both at levels far below evidence-based biodiversity targets. Formal forest protection grew rapidly in the two counties from 1968 to 2020 but reached only 4% of productive forests. From 2000 to 2019, habitat network functionality for old Scots pine declined by 15–41%, and Norway spruce by 15–88%. There were mixed trends for dead wood and tree retention at the stand scale. The net result of the continued transformation of near-natural forest remnants and conservation efforts was negative at the regional and landscape levels, but partly positive at the stand scale. However, at all three scales, habitat amounts were far below critical thresholds for the maintenance of viable populations of species, let alone ecological integrity. Collaboration among stakeholder categories should reject opinionated narratives, and instead rely on evidence-based knowledge about green infrastructure pressures, responses, and states.

Robust Bayesian estimator for S-wave spectra, using a combined empirical Green’s function

Summary We propose a new fully automatic and robust Bayesian method to estimate precise and reliable model parameters describing the observed S-wave spectra. All the spectra associated with each event are modelled jointly, using a t-distribution as likelihood function together with informative prior distributions for increased robustness against outliers and extreme values. The model includes the observed noise and a combined empirical Green’s function. It captures source-, receiver-, and path-dependent terms in the description of the observed spectra by combining a physical source and attenuation model with a spatially and event-size dependent empirical compensation. The proposed method propagates estimation uncertainties along the entire processing chain starting from the hypocentre location and delivers reliable uncertainty description of the estimands. The objective is to automatically provide robust and valid descriptions of the observed S-wave spectra generated from an earthquake source in a noisy and heterogeneous environment. The efficiency of the method is tested with synthetic seismograms, and the model is calibrated and cross-validated using 31 640 mining induced seismic events in a iron ore mine (in north of Sweden) with an comprehensive seismic network. The model is evaluated using both posterior predictive checks and residual analysis and we found no evidence that indicates any model deficiencies with respect to central tendency, dispersion, and residual trends.

Challenges in slope stability assessment of contaminated fibrous sediments along the northern Baltic coast of Sweden

In several locations along Sweden's northern Baltic coast there are deposits of contaminated fibrous sediments that are known as fiberbanks. Historically, these anthropogenic fiberbanks and associated contaminants were formed outside pulp and paper factories because of unregulated waste discharges. Some of the fiberbanks are located on seafloor slopes that are unstable and may fail, which could result in large amounts of fiber and contaminant dispersion. Hydroacoustic surveys have revealed that some parts of the fiberbanks have been dispersed to a wider area by submarine landslides. However, the unusual nature of these cellulose-rich sediments makes it difficult to apply conventional techniques for assessing submarine slope stability. Therefore, a combination of investigation techniques and interpretation methods was tested to assess the stability and triggering mechanisms for submarine slope failure identified in fiberbanks from the Ångermanälven river estuary on the Baltic sea coast. The integration of bathymetric data, sediment lithology and geotechnical characteristics from in-situ and laboratory measurements, enabled the characterisation of underlying natural sediments and the fiberbanks at two sites. Despite low densities, which indicate that the fiberbank material is near the buoyancy level, the fiberbank deposits seem to be relatively stable. Our results indicate the underlying natural sediments are also stable and would require an external triggering mechanism to generate the observed slope failures. We suggest that pore water pressure, potentially related to groundwater table fluctuations, may be an important trigger for submarine landslides in the study area.Management of fiberbanks and associated fiber-rich sediments, which are numerous along Sweden's north east coast, requires that sites are risk assessed and prioritized for remediation. To do so, under water slope stability should be considered as a possible dispersion pathway and therefore needs to be investigated. The study illustrates the value of using a combination of geophysical and geotechnical field and laboratory methods, together with empirical relationships, to assess relevant input parameters for slope stability calculations for this type of sediment.

Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Detecting Missing Clamps in Rail Fastening System from Differential Eddy Current Measurements

The rail fastening system forms an integral part of rail tracks, as it maintains the rail in a fixed position, upholding the track stability and track gauge. Hence, it becomes necessary to monitor their conditions periodically to ensure safe and reliable operation of the railway. Inspection is normally carried out manually by trained operators or by employing 2-D visual inspection methods. However, these methods have drawbacks when visibility is minimal and are found to be expensive and time consuming. In the previous study, the authors proposed a train-based differential eddy current sensor system that uses the principle of electromagnetic induction for inspecting the railway fastening system that can overcome the above-mentioned challenges. The sensor system includes two individual differential eddy current sensors with a driving field frequency of 18 kHz and 27 kHz respectively. This study analyses the performance of a machine learning algorithm for detecting and analysing missing clamps within the fastening system, measured using a train-based differential eddy current sensor. The data required for the study was collected from field measurements carried out along a heavy haul railway line in the north of Sweden, using the train-based differential eddy current sensor system. Six classification algorithms are tested in this study and the best performing model achieved a precision and recall of 96.64% and 95.52% respectively. The results from the study shows that the performance of the machine learning algorithms improved when features from both the driving channels were used simultaneously to represent the fasteners. The best performing algorithm also maintained a good balance between the precision and recall scores during the test stage.

Unpacking sustainable business models in the Swedish agricultural sector– the challenges of technological, social and organisational innovation

The global challenges of today are many, and one of the most concerning aspects relates to food production for an increasing global population. The sustainability of doing ‘more of the same thing’ is being increasingly called into question. Several sustainable business model frameworks have been presented in recent years to address these challenges, but our knowledge is limited about the change processes of the agricultural sector. This paper aims to increase our understanding of how sustainable business models have developed in the agricultural sector in Sweden. It maps eight archetypes of sustainable business models, clustered in three groups, with a focus on the technological, social, and organisational innovation components at agri-food companies. The study takes a quantitative, methodological approach, conducting a telephone survey with owners and managers of 1143 agri-food companies in Sweden, and using analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the analysis. The paper provides empirical evidence on the various options for sustainable business models that Swedish agri-food companies use. No major differences were found with respect to technical or social innovation components in the three regions: East, south, and north Sweden. However, significant differences were found between the regions with respect to the organisational innovation component. The organisational innovation component is based on two sustainable business model archetypes, namely, repurpose for society/environment and develop scale up solutions. North Sweden had a higher degree of organisational innovation than both south and east Sweden. The reason for this could be the larger environmental, economic, and organizational challenges in north Sweden compared to the rest of the country, which makes the need for innovation stronger. The paper also suggests new areas for researchers and practical avenues for stakeholders in the agricultural sector (and other industries) to translate social and environmental value creation into economic profit and competitive advantage. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use sustainable business model archetypes in an empirical setting in the agricultural sector.

Diachronous collision in the Seve Nappe Complex: Evidence from Lu–Hf geochronology of eclogites (Norrbotten, North Sweden)

AbstractThe collision of Baltica and Laurentia during the Caledonian Orogeny happened atc. 400–420 Ma. However, subduction and collision processes also took place before this main collisional phase and the tectonic history of these is still not fully resolved. The Seve Nappe Complex in Sweden has recorded these earlier phases. The Seve Nappe Complex in Norrbotten (North Swedish Caledonides) comprises four superimposed nappes emplaced by eastward thrusting (from base to top according to the conventional structural interpretation): Lower Seve Nappe, Vaimok, Sarek, and Tsäkkok Lenses. Eclogites occur in the Vaimok and Tsäkkok Lenses. The Vaimok Lens represents rocks of the Baltican continental margin intruded by Neoproterozoic dolerite dikes which were later eclogitized and boudinaged. By contrast, eclogites of the Tsäkkok Lens are former oceanic basalts associated with calcschists, possibly representing the ocean–continent transition between Baltica and Iapetus. Previous age determinations for eclogitization yielded various ages betweenc. 500 and 480 Ma, in contrast to younger (460–450 Ma) ages of ultra high‐Pmetamorphism in the Seve Nappe Complex further south in Jämtland. Eclogites from the Vaimok (one sample) and Tsäkkok (three samples) lenses were dated using Lu–Hf garnet geochronology. Garnet from all samples shows prograde zoning of major element and Lu contents and yielded well‐defined isochrons of the following ages: 480.4 ± 1.2 Ma (Vaimok); 487.7 ± 4.6 Ma, 486.2 ± 3.2, 484.6 ± 4.6 Ma (Tsäkkok). The ages from Tsäkkok are interpreted to date the burial of the Iapetus–Baltica ocean–continent transition in a west‐dipping subduction zone aroundc. 485 Ma, and the age from the structurally deeper Vaimok Nappe the following subduction of the continental margin. Previously reported ages of 500 Ma and older are not supported by this study. The age difference between eclogites in the Seve Nappe Complex in Jämtland (c. 460–450 Ma) and Norrbotten (c. 488–480 Ma) may reflect the collision of an island arc with an irregularly shaped passive continental margin of Baltica or alternatively the collision of a straight margin with a microcontinent (Sarek Lens) accreted to the upper plate.

Fate of active pharmaceutical ingredients in a northern high-rate algal pond fed with municipal wastewater

Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are vital to human health and welfare, but following therapeutic use, they may pose a potential ecological risk if discharged into the environment. Today’s conventional municipal wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove APIs specifically, and various techniques, preferably cost-effective and environmentally friendly, are being developed and evaluated. Microalgae-based treatment of wastewater is a sustainable and low-cost approach to remove nutrients and emerging contaminants. In this study, a North Sweden high-rate algal pond (HRAP) using municipal untreated wastewater as medium, was investigated in terms of API distribution and fate. Three six-day batches were prepared during 18 days and a total of 36 APIs were quantified within the HRAP of which 14 were removed from the aqueous phase above 50% and seven removed above 90% of their initial concentrations. Twelve APIs of a hydrophobic nature were mostly associated with the algal biomass that was harvested at the end of each batch. HRAPs treatment successfully removed 69% of studied APIs (25 of 36 studied) in six day time. The distribution of various APIs between the aqueous phase and biomass suggested that several removal mechanisms may occur, such as hydrophobicity driven removal, passive biosorption and active bioaccumulation.