The petroleum industry’s move into Norway’s Barents Sea
sector is being paralleled by active efforts to identify how much oil pollution
can be tolerated by life in these far northern waters.
Work by biologists and marine scientists at various
Norwegian research institutions over the past 10 years has covered such
commercial resources as shrimp, scallops, herring and cod.
Establishing tolerance levels for these and other species is
one of the tools needed to determine how Barents Sea oil production can be
pursued in an environmentally acceptable way.