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Variations in zooplankton populations in regions throughout the North Atlantic have been tied to changes in the Atlantic atmosphere-ocean system. Recent work has tended to focus on the impact on zooplankton of one particular climate mode, the NAO. However, it is important to remember that the NAO is only one measure of climatic conditions in this region. This chapter examines two particularly well-known regions, the North Sea and the Gulf of Maine, to characterize the range of mechanisms by which climate may influence zooplankton. Climate influences zooplankton populations in two main ways. Through its effect on ecosystem properties, such as the timing or magnitude of the spring bloom, climate variability can cause changes in zooplankton populations. Climate variability can have a significant effect on ocean circulation patterns, and thus, the distribution of zooplankton.

Climatic variability is most likely to have an effect on marine populations and it is important to understand further the synchronicity between climatic oscillations and the life cycle of benthic species. This chapter presents a variety of studies on climate influence on marine benthos communities in the North Sea, Skagerrak, and Baltic. The main conclusion is that the NAO affects single species as well as whole communities and functional groups, and that the impact may differ geographically and depend on the species composition of the communities.

This chapter focuses on the responses of phytoplankton as an indicator species of climate variation and change in Narragansett Bay, located in the northwest Atlantic, and in the North Sea and neighbouring regions of the northeast Atlantic. Narragansett Bay is selected because of the availability of a 38-year (1959-96) quantitative time series of phytoplankton and habitat based on weekly measurements. The seemingly increasing problem of harmful algal blooms and their possible link to climate variability and change are discussed.

Across the North Sea from England was a land that was known in the early Middle Ages, as part of it is today, as Frisia. This largely marshy land was a good place to live for those who managed to adjust to its potentially extreme but fertile habitat. Despite many archaeological observations and finds, our view of their social organisation is not very clear, and in part derived from better-documented parallels elsewhere. This chapter will first briefly describe the former landscape and its archaeological record, before dealing with the organisation of Frisia. Its focus will be on the northern part of Frisia. The aim of the chapter is to offer a general picture, based on recent research, of this country oriented towards the North Sea and its maintaining of close links to early medieval England.

This chapter focuses on the legal issues associated with proposals for offshore grid development in the EU and the US, and compares the means by which these might be addressed. The chapter is organized as follows. Section II examines the international legal framework for offshore development and considers the key question of whether it provides sufficient support for offshore grid projects of the type that are now being proposed. Section III considers how suitable regimes could be put in place to regulate the development and use of transmission infrastructure in the North Sea. Section IV provides an overview of the gradual progress that is being made towards creating a regulatory framework for offshore electricity generation and transmission in the US. Section V concludes by identifying key legal considerations that should be taken into account in strategic planning for combined offshore wind energy generation and transmission projects in general.

The discovery of oil and gas deposits in the British zone of the North Sea during the 1960s promised great economic benefits to the country. The British maritime industries were in various degrees of decline or difficulty by that decade. Could British shipyards find new business by building drilling rigs and supply vessels, and even production platforms± Could British ship owners diversify into the operation of drilling rigs and offshore support vessels± Could British ports provided the necessary base facilities to support the offshore energy industry in the North Sea± If the British maritime industries could make a success of their involvement in the North Sea, they would have the products and the expertise to offer in the emerging offshore energy markets around the world. Sadly, despite early successes and government encouragement, the British maritime industries largely failed to grasp the opportunities in the North Sea. By 1990 the successful exploitation of British offshore energy resources was largely carried out by foreign companies and operators.

This chapter considers the origins of the early Anglo-Saxon timber building tradition, concluding that while its links with the other side of the North Sea are clear, those with late Roman Britain are more difficult to establish. The development of timber buildings is set out. The ‘life-cycle’ of these buildings is then examined, and it is concluded that the life-spans of some Mid and Late Saxon buildings were extended through repair and rebuilding; such rebuilding in the early Anglo-Saxon period was rare and houses appear to have been broadly ‘single generational’. What this may reveal about changing attitudes towards ancestors and land is discussed. The form and function of buildings are then considered, followed by a review of the evidence for Grubenhäuser, and their relationship to earth-fast timber buildings.

This chapter focuses upon developments within what may be retrospectively designated an Anglo-Dutch-American archipelago. This was a geographical constellation, incorporating the Northern Netherlands, the British Isles and Atlantic North America, connected by people, their culture, and ships. In more modern metaphorical terms it scrutinizes the Anglo-Dutch subsection of the runway, and the aviation fuel in question, which was importantly North American. The chapter describes a series of economic, cultural, political, and military changes which began in the region between the Baltic and North Sea before crossing the North Sea, and then the Atlantic. The result was the process here called Anglo-Dutch-American early modernity. This world-changing current of invention (oceanic to begin with, electric eventually) achieved a breakthrough in the Low Countries, gathered heft and momentum in seventeenth-century England, and by connection with North America made something new.

This chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the comparison of rulers, warriors, traders, and clerics on the central Sahel and the North Sea region. It argues that there was more similarity between north-western Europe and the central Sahel in the few centuries either side of AD 1001 than has hitherto been recognised, and maintains that the nature of the sources has obscured these formative times and left them in the shadow of organised structures. It discusses the interconnectedness of central Sahel and north-west Europe through contacts and shared pre-industrial nature.

This chapter examines the importance of the 1882 North Sea fisheries-policing treaty-regime for the high-seas fisheries industry. It focuses on the innovative concept of multilateral reciprocal inspection and enforcement powers of the 1882 regime. It explains the main regulatory elements of the 1882 convention and evaluates the normative and procedural elements of the convention that are of interest today.

In the mid-1960s the British Government began issuing commercial licences for the exploration of the North Sea for gas and oil. Companies were required to share their geophysical findings with the Ministry of Power, and by 1967 officials in the Ministry were aware that they had a great deal of geological information they could neither analyse nor control. They were also aware that the first licenses would expire in 1970, at which time the Ministry would need to know the value of the licensed areas as another round of licensing began. The Institute of Geological Sciences (now the British Geological Survey) was therefore instructed to begin a rapid survey of the geology of the North Sea on behalf of the Ministry. This expansion of the Institute’s functions shaped it over the following decade, recast relations between ministries and scientific experts, and had long-term implications for the funding of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science in Britain.

A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning Oil, subdivided into Historical and Modern Studies, and exploring the topics as follows: Seabed Exploitation; Offshore Operations; the North Sea; and Other Locations.

Many species are going extinct, mainly due to anthropogenic activities and climate forcing. The ecological significance of extinction has been linked to the sequential order of species loss and whether the extinction risk of each species is associated with the life-history traits that play an important role in ecosystem functioning. Trait-based extinction scenarios have been applied to studies on the consequences of possible biodiversity-environment futures for ecosystem functioning across a range of freshwater, terrestrial, and marine habitats, and for a variety of ecosystem functions. This chapter proposes a model code for a range of extinction scenarios and illustrates its application at local and regional scales. It explains how non-random extinction scenarios can be implemented and presents a case study that demonstrates the implications of regional biodiversity loss on carbon cycling in the shelf sea sediments of the North Sea. More specifically, it examines the per capita effect of each macrofaunal species on sediment mixing using an index of benthic bioturbation.

The Admiralty had been confident in the Navy’s ability to prevent a French invasion prior to 1903. Thereafter, however, it quickly became apparent that Germany posed a fundamentally different challenge from the Franco-Russian threat Britain had faced in the 1890s and early 1900s. For a series of geographical, infrastructural, and military reasons, a German invasion of the British Isles came to be viewed with a great deal more apprehension at the Admiralty than had ever been generated by the years of tension with France. This chapter examines how and why Britain’s naval leadership came to fear a German attempt to land in the United Kingdom. Building on the appreciation of contemporary naval thought developed in Chapter 1, it recounts how the Admiralty identified a challenge that came to define its strategic agenda between 1907 and 1914.

This chapter provides two empirical applications based on the dynamic economic model of the fishery introduced in chapter 3, namely for the Western Channel sole fishery and the North Sea herring fishery. For both fisheries, it is assumed that they are managed by a resource manager whose objective is to maximise the present value of net economic benefits from the fishery. As pointed out in chapter 3, a resource manager is faced with two main questions, namely: determining i) the optimal stock level and ii) the optimal rate of investment in the stock. The emphasis in the case studies is on the first question, although the second is also addressed. In the analysis, discrete time dynamic bioeconomic models, where time is specified in years for the empirical applications, are developed. This is natural, based on relevant characteristics of the fisheries in question. Moreover, only annual data are available. For herring, the recruitment function includes a time lag. For both fisheries, optimal stock level and associated harvest are estimated under different assumptions, and policy implications are discussed.

This Chapter discusses the many important differences between the nature and processes of Industrialisation in Scotland and Norway from the 18^th Century up to the present day. The dissferences discussed particularly concern the timing of the shift from ‘proto-industrialisation’ to ’modern industrialisation’ based on the factory system; the relationship between agrarian, rural, urban and industrial development, especially concerning the peasantry, migration streams and urbanisation; working-class divisions and alliances; attitudes and policies concerning foreign interest and capital in relation to basic resources; the source of energy for modern industry and its impacts on the location of industrial development; the importance of domestic and overseas markets and industrial protection; different ideas on the role of the State and protectionism; and the differential impact of neo-liberal policies after 1970. It is argued that because of these deep-rooted differences and Scotland’s constitutional position within the UK, the experience of the development and exploitation of North Sea oil and gas in the two countries after about 1970 is also quite different, as are its social and economic consequences. Among other points, the Chapter discusses how Norway’s strong local government tradition (Ch.5) leveraged Norway’s wealth-sharing scheme from its oil and gas boom, and the importance of Norway’s Concession Laws of 1906-09 restricting the activities of foreign capital in natural resources, which set the stage and deepened Norway’s public goods culture. In contrast, Scotland’s oil revenues routinely bled off to elites and investors.