Hunting a Greenland shark from a rubber boat
Weather, currents, and the sea itself repeatedly thwart them, and the shark stays mostly absent. The expedition shows how a narrow, possibly futile goal can structure a year of close attention to a place.
Shark Drunk
4 ideas
Shark drunk: toxicity in Greenland shark flesh
Greenland shark flesh is rich in trimethylamine oxide, a compound that protects its proteins against deep-water pressure and cold. When eaten fresh, the flesh breaks down into trimethylamine, which causes intoxication-like symptoms that northern peoples call being 'shark drunk'. Arctic cultures made the meat edible through long processing such as burying, fermenting, and drying, as with Icelandic hákarl.
The ocean remains Earth's least-known frontier
The deep sea is the planet's largest habitat by volume, yet it is less mapped and understood than the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. Enormous, very long-lived animals like the Greenland shark, which may live for centuries, can go almost unstudied in waters just off inhabited coasts. Human knowledge of nature is therefore heavily biased toward what is visible and reachable from land.
Cod migration as the engine of northern history
Every winter the skrei, spawning Arctic cod, return to the Vestfjord. Viewed this way, settlement, trade networks, and power in northern Norway follow the biology of a single fish rather than the decisions of rulers.