„Spill response for the future“ – that’s the title of a conference that has brought me to Trondheim in northern Norway.
There\’s still a pile of snow on the runway – but it\’s hardly recognizable as such as the winter gradually fades even up here.

At the Arctic Frontiers meeting in January, several people said to me in interviews it was just a matter of when and not a matter of if we would see another oil accident of one sort or other in northern waters. Just shortly afterwards, an Icelandic ship ran aground at the mouth of the Oslo Fjord, spilling fuel into the Ytre Hvaler marine park, Norway’s only natural marine reserve.
Weather conditions, ice and the cold temperature of the water make oil accidents harder to deal with up here. As climate change is opening up Arctic areas to shipping, oil and gas exploration, the chances of an oil spill in remote and extreme conditions will rise. There are still clumps of oil in Prince William Sound in Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989.
SINTEF is a Scandinavian independent research organisation, with its headquarters here in Trondheim. Over the next couple of days, experts here will be discussing the challenges of extending oil and gas development northwards and presenting technologies to respond to oil spills. On Friday I’ll be paying a visit to the laboratories. I’ll keep you posted.
A year after the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, it will also be interesting to hear from experts involved in trying to clean up and limit the damage.

It’s hard to concentrate on other things with a potentially major nuclear catastrophe on the horizon in Japan. I interviewed the head of a Greenpeace team of experts who were in Chernobyl looking into the lasting after-effects of the disaster 25 years ago when the news started to come in from Japan. She described the looks on people’s faces as they heard it and says their expressions told her “we know what that area of Japan will look like in 25 years time.” Deformed children, contaminated foodstuffs…
You would think this latest disaster would really put governments off nuclear power, which of course the pro-atomic lobby has been selling as “climate-friendly”. Germany’s current government had upturned the previous government’s momentous decision to phase out nuclear power and extended the life of a lot of old reactors. Now Chancellor Merkel has had to partially abandon her policy, declaring a three-month moratorium on the extension… Sounds complicated? (More background on the dw website)There’s a huge debate going on here on whether Germany should go it alone on abandoning nuclear. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Professor Carlos Duarte, a leading scientist involved in he EU\’s “Arctic Tipping Points” programme. (Listen to the story on how the Arctic is setting off alarm bells for the global climate on Living Planet.) When it comes to halting climate change, he told me the time for governments to wait and see who will make the first move is over, somebody needs to go ahead unilaterally and take the first steps. I\’d say the same applies to nuclear power. I wonder how some of the key figures who shifted from an anti- to a pro-nuclear stance because of the urgency of climate change are feeling now?
I hope this latest catastrophe will push support for renewables. But of course there is the danger that countries opting out of nuclear will burn more fossil fuels. We seem to be caught in a very vicious circle…

Ice blog followers may remember my account of a visit to the Svalbard seed vault, which preserves a wide variety of seeds safe under the permafrost of an Arctic mountain for posterity. The story is also online at DW’s environment website.

The idea is that saving a wide diversity of crop seeds could help humankind survive in the future in spite of any disasters occurring – or, for instance, to help agriculture cope with the challenges of a changing climate.
Well the vault has just celebrated its third birthday with a bumper delivery of seeds from different parts of the world. For the first time ever, seeds have been delivered from Australia, just about as far away as you can get from the Arctic. Australia is one of the areas of the world that are particularly vulerable to climate change. It has had to cope with an increasing number of extreme weather events, droughts and floods. The seeds brought to Svalbard were the furthest travelled of the more than 600,000 samples now stored at the vault.
Most of Australia’s food crops come from outside the country, and so are dependent on global crop diversity.
There’s more information on the website of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. See also “Wild Relatives can save our food supply” on why it’s important to preserve crop seeds for posterity.

There is an interesting – if worrying – story on the Global Ideas website about the rapid melting of the country’s glaciers and problems being caused by climate change. Peru is regarded as being highly vulnerable to climate change.

Beyond penguins and polar bears is a website you have to look at for the pictures alone – as well as understandable information on polar issues.
It’s actually an educational website for teachers. I found out about it because it has just won a science prize for online education SPORE
The idea is to use the appeal of penguins and polar bears to get kids interested in science. But there ‘s a lot of background on there for us adults as well.