Veta La Palma, Seville, Spain

Veta la Palma is an aquaculture farm located on an island in the Guadalquivir river, 10 miles (16 km) inland from the Atlantic Ocean in Seville province of Spain. It produces 1,200 tons of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. Given its 32 km^2 area this gives a yearly yield of 37 tons per square kilometer. Yet unlike most of the world's fish farms, it does so not by interfering with nature, but by improving upon it. Dan Barber, a chef and restaurant owner in New York, describes it as "a farm that doesn't feeds its animals, a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators and a farm that's literally a water purification plant.

Veta la Palma is also the largest and most important[who?] private owned bird sanctuary in the world because of the 250 different species of birds feeding on the fishes of the farm. This farm is owned by food majors Hisparroz. Hisparroz president, Luis Contreras says "We call it the pata negra of sea bass."

Size: approx. 5.6km x 5.6km

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veta_La_Palma

Droppings from heaven

“Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it,” said Pablo Arriola, director of Proabonos, the state company that controls guano production, referring to conflicts like the Chincha Islands War, in which Peru prevented Spain from reasserting control over the guano islands. “Guano is a highly desirous enterprise.”

Image: Workers collect guano on Isla Guañape off Peru, which conserves the resource to prevent depletion. Guano's status as an organic fertilizer has increased demand.

Source: New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/americas/30peru.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Fv355 to Bugøynes

summer : winter

Oyster-tecture by SCAPE

MoMA Rising Currents Exhibition, 2010

SCAPE proposes to nurture an active oyster culture that engages issues of water quality, rising tides, and community based development around Brooklyn's Red Hook and Gowanus Canal. An armature for the growth of native oysters and marine life is designed for the shallow waters of the Bay Ridge Flats just south of Red Hook. This living reef is constructed from a field of piles and a woven web of "fuzzy rope" that supports oyster growth and builds a rich three-dimensional landscape mosaic. A watery regional park for the New York Harbor emerges that prefigures the city's return to the waterfront in the next century. The reef attenuates waves and cleans millions of gallons of Harbor water through harnessing the biotic processes of oysters, mussels and eelgrass, and enables neighborhood fabrics that welcome the water to develop further inland.

Source: http://www.scapestudio.com/projects/oyster-tecture/

Kelp fuel breakthrough

Scientists have long struggled to produce ethanol from seaweed. The stumbling block was alginate, one of four kinds of sugars produced by seaweed. Alginate — a complex polysaccharide — is difficult for microbes to breakdown. The breakthrough came when the researchers identified a biochemical pathway used by Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that feeds on brown seaweed, and inserted the responsible genes into a strain of E. coli. The bacterium was designed to convert the seaweed sugars directly into ethanol.

"About 60 percent of the dry biomass of seaweed are fermentable carbohydrates, and approximately half of those are locked in a single carbohydrate - alginate," said Daniel Trunfio, Chief Executive Officer at Bio Architecture Lab, in a statement. "Our scientists have engineered an enzyme to degrade and a pathway to metabolize the alginate, allowing us to utilize all the major sugars in seaweed, which therefore makes the biomass an economical feedstock for the production of renewable fuels and chemicals." The study estimates that seaweed growing in less than 3 percent of the planet's coastal waters could produce enough ethanol to replace over 60 billion gallons of fossil fuels. It notes that large-scale seaweed production is already common around the world.

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0120-kelp_power.html#ixzz1oFXFNZSP

Japan from nuclear to LNG

“The Japanese market is the biggest LNG market in the world and considering the decision by the Japanese government to reduce nuclear power generation, the demand for LNG into Japan will only increase,” Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller told reporters on Monday, Reuters reports.

Several shipping companies worldwide are now prospecting ice-classed LNG tankers to ship Barents- and Yamal Arctic gas to the markets in Asia, as previously reported by BarentsObserver.

source: http://www.barentsobserver.com/shtokman-lng-to-substitute-nuclear-in-japan.5011294-16149.html

Feedback 23.02.11

Alf
- The remoteness of the region but proximity to Russia. Where is Murmansk? Include Murmansk into the discussion.
- Debate about open border with Russia like Sweden, how would this affect the region?
- Can be conceptualised as Kirkenes, Vadsø, Vardø AND Murmansk.

Giambattista
- Intermediate scale between supralocal and regional where currently there's a big jump.
- Diversify within ecological potentials, exisiting marine network with terrestrial systems, examining points of intersection.
- Present the different landscapes and produced landscapes through photos.
- Construct project through georgraphical and physical relationships.
- Layering of different systems to break down complex visual information.

Paul
- Socio-economical issues. What's the population growth with projected industries?
- Include NSR route

Sigurborg
- Where are the lines that reveal exchange between Russia and Norway? Goods, people, knowledge etc.

Pernille
- Clarify kelp characteristics