Dear Colleagues,

Detection and remediation of oil spills has been subject to a multitude of studies in the past decades. More recently, potential accidents in the Arctic Ocean have received increasing attention in marine science and industry: The distance of the shipping route from Northern Europe to China and Japan is approximately 4,500 nautical miles shorter along the Northeast Passage as compared to the traditional route through the Suez Canal. Decreasing sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean grants access to these fast shipping routes and will inevitably result in an increase in ship traffic along the Arctic coasts. Moreover, oil and gas resources on the Arctic shelves will be increasingly accessible and subject to exploitation. This in turn increases the likelihood of spills and accidents involving platforms, pipelines and ships.

Recently, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the incident with the oil platform Kulluk in the Gulf of Alaska brought this issue back to public awareness. Spills in the Arctic involve fundamentally new challenges for detection and remediation: (i) sea ice hinders spill detection by remote sensing methods and accessibility for remediation infrastructure and mechanical methods. (ii) The lack of nearby infrastructure would add another challenge for fast response to spills which is usually most important for an effective remediation. (iii) Low temperatures reduce the efficiency of microbial remediation of oil spills and (iv) counteractions in wintertime could considerably be aggravated by the availability of daylight.

This special issue aims at a compilation of state of the art approaches which address these specific challenges for detection and all types of remediation of oil and gas spills in high latitudes.

Prof. Dr. Boris Peter Koch
Dr. Elisabeth Helmke
Guest Editors

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• oil spill
• oil detection
• remote sensing
• pollution
• vulnerability
• arctic ocean
• arctic coasts
• sediments
• climate change
• sea ice
• bioremediation
• remediation