Knut Ola Dølven will publically defend his PhD thesis entitled, “Measuring Methane in the Arctic Ocean – From legal framework to time series analysis via technology innovation” on March 24th 2022 at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. This work was funded by the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment, and Climate (CAGE) at UiT.
The trial lecture and public defense will be streamed online.
Popular scientific abstract
To reach international agreement on solutions to solve climate change and a sustainable future, a thorough understanding of environmental processes is crucial. Methane seeping from the seabed in the Arctic Ocean can cause climate change and is not well understood and more data is needed. This thesis have approach this problem from mainly an oceanographic, but also legal perspective. An inter-disciplinary assessment show that the implementation of innovative technology is not currently being hampered by legal issues. Two long-term time series from two intense methane seep sites offshore West Spitsbergen show very high variability on short time-scales which highlights the potential for errors in budget estimates. Lower concentration towards winter is explained by stronger mixing and winter storms. We developed a new technique for monitoring seabed seepage using an acoustic ocean current meter and also a method for retrieving fast response data from slow response methane sensors.
The plan for Knut Ola Dølven’s public defense for the PhD degree in Science, on March 24th 2022, is as follows:
Trial lecture at 10:15 on the following topic:
‘The global carbon cycle’
PhD thesis defense at 12:15:
‘Measuring Methane in the Arctic Ocean – From legal framework to time series analysis via technology innovation’
PhD Thesis is published and available here.
Supervisors:
- Dr. Bénédicte Ferré, Department of Geosciences (main supervisor)
- Dr. Peter Linke, GEOMAR, Germany
Evaluation Committee:
- Associate professor Daniel Frank McGinnis, University of Geneva, Switzerland (1. Opponent)
- Dr. Carolyn Graves, Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Sciences (Cefas), UK (2. Opponent)
- Professor Alfred Hanssen, Department of Geosciences, UiT (internal member and leader of the committee)
Leader of the defense:
- Vise Dean for Education Hilja Lisa Huru, Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT
To read more about the findings of this research:
Woker, H., Schartmüller, B., Dølven, K. O. & Blix, K. (2020). The law of the sea and current practices of marine scientific research in the Arctic. Marine Policy, 115, 103850. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2020.103850
Dølven, K. O., Ferré, B., Silyakova, A., Jansson, P., Linke, P., and Moser, M. (2022) Autonomous methane seep site monitoring offshore western Svalbard: hourly to seasonal variability and associated oceanographic parameters, Ocean Sci., 18, 233–254. https://doi.org/10.5194/os-18-233-2022
Dølven, K.O., Vierinen, J., Grilli, R., Triest, J. & Ferre, B. (2021). Response time correction of slow response sensor data by deconvolution of the growth-law equation. Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems, preprint, in review. Also available at https://doi.org/10.5194/gi-2021-28.
Dølven, K.O. (2022). Replication data for Autonomous methane seep site monitoring offshore Western Svalbard: Hourly to seasonal variability and associated oceanographic parameters. DataverseNO, V1, https://doi.org/10.18710/CEIA1U.