Animals in the United States

Deep Inside A Norwegian Fjord, A Dream Of Farming Salmon Sustainably

"The Salmon Eye," run by Eide Fjordbruck, is an education center located at the mouth of Norway's Hardangersfjord. It is the world's largest floating art installation and a vision of the company's CEO Sondre Eide. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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HARDANGERSFJORD, NORWAY - Jørgen Wengaard steers around the rocky islands of a fjord, his boat cutting through the water's still surface, sending ripples toward silent forested shores. But here in the Hardangersfjord of western Norway, still waters run deep: more than 2,000 feet deep.

"The Norwegian coastline is perfect for farming Atlantic salmon," says Wengaard. "We have the optimal temperature. We have good oxygen levels. We have the right salinity and the water is always changing due to strong currents. That's very good for farming."

Wengaard is headed to one of the fjord's several salmon farms, known by their cylindrical pens made from nylon netting, some holding hundreds of thousands of salmon each under the surface of Hardangersfjord.

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Norway is the world's largest exporter of farmed salmon; more than a fifth of salmon consumed by Americans comes from the Nordic country. And as Norway exports more salmon across the world, the industry has come under criticism from environmental groups who say salmon farms are irreversibly impacting the pristine environment of Norway's fjords.

Wengaard's boat glides to a stop at a floating walkway surrounding two areas of open water, around 50 feet in diameter, lined with bright yellow nylon netting: a salmon farm run by the company Lingalaks. Wengaard, who's worked much of his life on salmon farms, is a tour guide here.

A salmon farm run by the company Lingalaks in the Hardangersfjord, Norway. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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"This is quite a small fish farm," he says, climbing out of his boat. "We have two pens with only 15,000 salmon in each. That might sound like a lot, but on a regular-sized fish farm, they have one million salmon."

Above these open water pens, a mechanical arm swivels in place, shooting out pellets of food. It prompts silver streaks in the water below: a feeding frenzy. The pens are home for these Atlantic Salmon from March to December. In those nine months, the fish grow to a weight between 10 and 15 pounds, and then they're taken to a processing plant where they're stunned before they're slaughtered, filleted and exported around the world.

But for now, they're here, eating and swimming, the only thing separating them from the open ocean is a thin nylon net.

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"We need to inspect it every single day and look for holes, because we really don't want the salmon to escape," says Wengaard, pointing to a television screen inside the Lingalaks facility where the company is able to monitor both the health of the fish and whether the net holding them is compromised in any way.

"We don't want them to mix with the wild salmon," continues Wengaard. "So even though these salmon come from wild salmon originally, we don't want them to mix their genes and destroy the spawning places for the wild salmon."

But according to many industry experts, it's too late for that.

Jørgen Wengaard, a tour guide at the Lingalaks salmon farm in Hardangersfjord, Norway, uses a mouse to steer the camera inside one of the farm's open-net fish pens which holds 15,000 Atlantic Salmon. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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Hundreds of miles east of the fjords in the capital Oslo, author Simen Saetre sits on a bench at his local park beside the raging waters of the Akerselva River, where wild salmon, he says, can sometimes be seen, right in the middle of Norway's biggest city.

"I've never fished it myself, but sometimes you see people in the river and they report nice catches," he says.

Saetre, who co-authored The New Fish, a book about Norway's salmon farming industry, says Norway's wild salmon population has been cut in half in the past two decades largely due to the impact of tens of millions of farmed salmon. Each year, an average of 200,000 farmed salmon escape from their open net pens, a significant number when you consider that there are only an estimated 500,000 wild salmon left in the country, says Saetre.

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"These farmed salmon then go and swim up to random rivers and then mate with wild salmon, and they weaken the wild salmon stock because these farmed salmon, they are made to be fat and slow and be effective for the industry," says Saetre. "But when they mate with the wild salmon, the wild salmon offspring become slow and fat and easy to catch for predators."

That's a big reason, says Saetre, why Norway's wild salmon stock is rapidly dying out. A study this year by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and the Institute of Marine Research found that nearly a third of wild salmon in Norway have "significant genetic changes" due to interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon. But Saetre says there is a bigger problem with Norway's farmed salmon: sea lice. They're tiny crustaceans that attach themselves to salmon, feed on them, and reproduce.

A pilot project run by the salmon farming company Eide Fjordbruck is a closed pen tank that holds 200,000 salmon. The closed pen protects the salmon from sea lice and prevents the salmon inside from escaping and interbreeding with wild salmon. The waste of the salmon is transported to a biogas tank, where its used to make energy. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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"These sea lice have lived for ages on wild salmon swimming by and attached to them," says Saetre. "And then when you gather millions of big salmon in the fjords and the sea lice get into that, it's like a heaven for the sea lice, and they grow and adapt."

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In a four-year study ending in 2020, Norwegian scientists discovered that in the fjords of western Norway mortality rates among farmed salmon from sea lice infestation reached more than 30%. Salmon farms use chemicals like pesticides to treat their fish, but scientists have discovered that sea lice have evolved to become resistant to the chemicals.

But one salmon farmer says he has a solution to all these problems.

In another part of the Hardangersfjord, Sondre Eide, the young third-generation CEO of his family salmon farming company Eide Fjordbruck, navigates his boat through the rain to what he calls his salmon farm of the future. When he arrives, Eide points to a black cylinder barely sticking out of the water, surrounded by floating gangplanks. It's the cap of what appears to be a tank.

"This tank goes down 72 meters. If it were on land, it would be the highest building on the west side of Norway," Eide says. "It holds 200,000 fish."

Sondre Eide, the third-generation CEO of Eide Fjordbruck, has spent tens of millions of dollars building a massive closed pen to try and innovate the salmon farming industry in Norway. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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This, says Eide, is closed pen salmon farming: no escaped salmon and no salmon lice.

"So it is all about giving the optimal life for the fish inside," explains Eide. "And then, of course, when you take away the salmon lice, you have no salmon treatment, so you don't have the handling, and that's responsible for 60 to 70% of all the mortality in the industry. So then you can focus on how can we create the best lives for the fish instead of the next lice treatment."

Eide and a team of his company's engineers put years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars into this closed pen, which circulates ocean water into it and keeps lice out. It also filters out salmon waste – a big contributor to rising nitrogen levels in the fjords – by carrying it through a series of tubes to a separate tank where it eventually creates biogas which, in turn, can be used as energy to power this very facility, Eide's next project.

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Eide's closed loop farming system raises the question: Why isn't the entire industry farming salmon this way? While Norway's government has been slow to explore this new technology, the government of Canada, another major salmon exporter, is phasing out open pens for its salmon farming industry to push companies to build pens like the one Eide has engineered. Eide says when he and his team looked for the technology to accomplish this, it simply wasn't there. He had the money to try and build it, he says, so he did.

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"For me, it was the right thing to do, and I 100% believe it from the bottom of my heart," says Eide. "I know my father would have done the same today. My grandfather would've have done the same, too, because times change and we have to change with them."

Sondre Eide built The Salmon Eye as an education center and Michelin-starred restaurant. It is the world's largest floating art installation. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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To underscore this push for sustainable salmon farming, Eide climbs back into his boat and navigates it toward an even bolder project he's built: the world's largest floating art installation, just a 10-minute boat ride from his salmon farm. It's a reflective silver orb that looks like a UFO that has crash-landed into the ocean. Eide calls it the Salmon Eye, and once our boat arrives to a dock attached to it, we enter what looks like a sleek lair of a James Bond villain, but what is actually an education center about threats to the environment.

Inside, visitors watch images projected on the walls and floor while hearing stories about an environment in peril before participating in a role play about the sustainability of salmon farming. After that, those who have managed to secure a reservation for Eide's Michelin-Starred restaurant upstairs partake in an 18-course tasting menu of sustainable seafood.

"We need 50% more food towards 2050," says Eide. "And we have used 50% of all useable land for food production. And we have only used 2% of the calories coming from the ocean, and yet we know less about the ocean than we do about space."

And somewhere in these vast, deep, bodies of water, says Eide, lies the answer to feeding the world sustainably.

The Deep-sea 'emergency Service' That Keeps The Internet Running

Ninety-nine percent of the world's digital communications rely on subsea cables. When they break, it could spell disaster for a whole country's internet. How do you fix a fault at the bottom of the ocean?

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It was a little after 17:00 on 18 November 1929 when the ground began to shake. Just off the coast of Burin Peninsula, a finger-like protrusion on the south of Newfoundland, Canada, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake disturbed the evening's peace. Residents noticed only a little damage at first – a few toppled chimney pots.

But out at sea, an unseen force was moving. By around 19:30, a 13m-high (43ft) tsunami made landfall on the Burin Peninsula. In total, 28 people lost their lives as a result of drowning or injuries caused by the wave.

The earthquake was devastating for the local communities, but it also had a long-lasting effect further out at sea. It had triggered a submarine landslide. People did not realise this at the time, historical records suggest, because no one knew such underwater landslides existed. When sediment is disturbed by earthquakes and other geological activity it makes the water denser, causing it to flow downwards like an avalanche of snow down a mountain. The submarine landslide – called a turbidity current – flowed more than 1,000km (621 miles) away from the earthquake's epicentre on the Laurentian Continental Slope at speeds between 50 and 70 knots (57-80mph).

Although the landslide was not noticed at the time, it left a tell-tale clue. In its way lay the latest in communication technology at the time: transatlantic subsea cables. And those cables broke. Twelve of them were snapped in a total of 28 places. Some of the 28 breaks happened almost synchronously with the earthquake. But the other 16 breaks happened over a much longer period, as the cables snapped one after the other in a kind of mysterious ripple pattern, from 59 minutes after the earthquake to 13 hours and 17 minutes later, and over 500km (311 miles) away from the epicentre. 

If they'd all been snapped by the quake itself, the cables would have all broken at the same time – so scientists began to wonder, why didn't they? Why did they break one after the other? 

It wasn't until 1952 that researchers pieced together why the cables broke in sequence, over such a large area, and at intervals that seemed to slow with distance from the epicentre. They figured out that a landslide smashed through them – the snapping cables traced its movement across the seafloor. Until that point, no one knew of the existence of turbidity currents. Because these cables broke, and because there was a record of the time they broke, they helped in the understanding of ocean movements above and below the surface. They caused a complex repair job, but also became accidental scientific instruments, recording a fascinating natural phenomenon far out of human sight. (Read more about the undersea rivers that threaten the world's internet.)

Over the following decades, as the global web of deep-sea cables expanded, their repair and maintenance has resulted in other surprising scientific discoveries – opening up entirely new worlds and allowing us to spy on the seabed like never before, while also allowing us to communicate at record speed. At the same time, our daily lives, incomes, health and safety have also become more and more dependent on the internet – and ultimately, this complex network of undersea cables. So what happens when they break?

Submarine cables form a global web at the bottom of the sea, keeping us all connected (Credit: Getty)

How our data travels

There are 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) of telecommunication cables on the seafloor, covering every ocean on the planet. Laid end to end, these cables would span the diameter of the Sun, and are responsible for the transfer of 99% of all digital data. But for something so important, they are surprisingly slender – often little more than 2cm in diameter, or about the width of a hosepipe.

A repeat of the 1929 mass cable outage would have significant impacts on communication between North America and Europe. However, "for the most part, the global network is remarkably resilient," says Mike Clare, the International Cable Protection Committee's marine environmental advisor who researches the impacts of extreme events on submarine systems. "There are 150 to 200 instances of damage to the global network each year. So if we look at that against 1.4 million km, that's not very many, and for the most part, when this damage happens, it can be repaired relatively quickly."

How does the internet run on such slim cables and avoid disastrous outages?

Since the first cables were laid in the 19th Century, they have been exposed to extreme environmental events, from submarine volcanic eruption to typhoons and floods. But the biggest cause of damage is not natural.

Most faults, with figures varying 70-80% depending on where you are in the world, relate to accidental human activities like the dropping of anchors or dragging of trawler boat nets, which snag on the cables, says Stephen Holden, head of maintenance for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Global Marine, a subsea engineering firm who respond to subsea cable repairs. These usually occur in depths of 200-300m (but commercial fishing is increasingly pushing into deeper waters – in some places, 1,500m in the Northeast Atlantic). Only 10-20% of faults worldwide relate to natural hazards, and more frequently relate to cables wearing thin in places where currents cause them to rub against rocks, causing what are called "shunt faults", says Holden.

(The idea that cables break because sharks bite through them is now a bit of an urban legend, adds Clare. "There were instances of sharks damaging cables, but that's long gone because the cable industry uses a layer of Kevlar to strengthen them.")

Cables have to be kept thin and light in deeper waters, though, to aid with recovery and repair. Hauling a large, heavy cable up from thousands of metres below sea level would put a huge amount of strain on it. It's the cables nearer the shoreline that tend to be better armoured because they are more likely to be snagged by nets and anchors.

An army of stand-by repair ships 

If a fault is found, a repair ship is dispatched. "All these vessels are strategically placed around the world to be 10-12 days from base to port," says Mick McGovern, deputy vice-president for marine operations at Alcatel Submarine Networks. "You have that time to work out where the fault is, load the cables [and the] repeater bodies" – which increase the strength of a signal as it travels along the cables. "In essence when you think how big the system is, it's not long to wait," he says.

While it took nine months to repair the last of the subsea cable damage caused by the 1929 Newfoundland earthquake, McGovern says a modern deep-water repair should take a week or two depending on the location and the weather. "When you think about the water depth and where it is, that's not a bad solution."

That does not mean an entire country's internet is then down for a week. Many nations have more cables and more bandwidth within those cables than the minimum required amount, so that if some are damaged, the others can pick up the slack. This is called redundancy in the system. Because of this redundancy, most of us would never notice if one subsea cable was damaged – perhaps this article would take a second or two longer to load than normal. In extreme events, it can be the only thing keeping a country online. The 2006 magnitude 7 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan, severed dozens of cables in the South China Sea – but a handful remained online.

To repair the damage, the ship deploys a grapnel, or grappling hook, to lift and snip the cable, pulling one loose end up to the surface and reeling it in across the bow with large, motorised drums. The damaged section is then winched into an internal room and analysed for a fault, repaired, tested by sending a signal back to land from the boat, sealed and then attached to a buoy while the process is repeated on the other end of the cable.

Once both ends are fixed, each optical fibre is spliced together under microscope to make sure that there is good connection, and then they are sealed together with a universal joint that is compatible with any manufacturer's cable, making life easier for international repair teams, McGovern says.

Deep-sea cables can double as scientific instruments, giving us insights into life in the ocean (Credit: Getty)

The repaired cables are lowered back into the water, and in shallower waters where there might be more boat traffic, they are buried in trenches. Remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), equipped with high-powered jets, can blast tracks into the seabed for cables to be laid into. In deeper waters, the job is done by ploughs which are equipped with jets and dragged along the seabed by large repair vessels above. Some ploughs weigh more than 50 tonnes, and in extreme environments, bigger equipment is needed – such as one job McGovern recalls in the Arctic Ocean which required a ship dragging a 110-tonne plough, capable of burying cables 4m and penetrating the permafrost. 

Ears on the sea floor

Laying and repairing the cables has led to some surprising scientific insights – at first somewhat accidentally, as in the case of the snapped cables and the landslide, and later, by design, as scientists began to intentionally use the cables as research tools.

These lessons from the deep sea began as the first transatlantic cables were laid in the 19th Century. Cable layers noticed that the Atlantic Ocean gets shallower in the middle, inadvertently discovering the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Today, telecommunication cables can be used as "acoustic sensors" to detect whales, ships, storms and earthquakes in the high seas.

The damage caused to cables offers the industry "fundamental new understandings about hazards that exist in the deep sea," says Clare. "We'd never have known that there were landslides under the sea after volcanic eruptions if it wasn't from the damage that was created."

In some places, climate change is making matters more challenging. Floods in West Africa are causing an increase in canyon-flushing in the Congo River, which is when large volumes of sediment flows into a river after flooding. This sediment is then dumped out of the river mouth into the Atlantic and could damage cables. "We know now to lay the cable further away from the estuary," says McGovern.

Extreme Repairs

Extreme Repairs is a BBC.Com series about the world of big infrastructure repair and maintenance, featuring the brave men and women who risk their lives to keep us all safe and connected.

Some damage will be unavoidable, the experts predict. The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption in 2021-2022 destroyed the subsea internet cable linking the Pacific Island nation of Tonga to the rest of the world. It took five weeks until its internet connection was fully functioning again, though some make-shift services were restored after a week. While this huge eruption (casting a plume of ash 36 miles (58km) into the air) was an unusually large event, connecting an island nation in a volcanically active area will always carry some risk, says Holden.

However, many countries are served by multiple subsea cables, meaning one fault, or even multiple faults, might not be noticed by internet users, as the network can fall back on other cables in a crisis.

"This really points to why there's a need for geographic diversity of cable routes," adds Clare. "Particularly for small islands in places like the South Pacific that have tropical storms and earthquakes and volcanoes, they are particularly vulnerable, and with climate change, different areas are being affected in different ways." 

As fishing and shipping get more sophisticated, avoiding cables might be made easier. The advent of automatic identification system (AIS) on shipping has led to a reduction in anchoring damage, says Holden, because some firms now offer a service where you can follow a set pattern for slowing down and anchoring. But in areas of the world where fishing vessels tend to be less sophisticated and operated by smaller crews, anchor damage still happens.

In those places, an option is to tell people where cables are, and to increase awareness, adds Clare: "It's for everyone's benefit that the internet keeps running."

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Is The Deep Ocean More Magnificent Than Outer Space?

MORE IS known about the surface of Mars than the floor of the ocean. By one count America spends 150 times more on space exploration than ocean research. Scientists have mapped almost every Martian crater but only about 20% of the seabed. Yet interest in the ocean is growing. A trio of new books plunges into the deep. They journey through the bioluminescent realm of the twilight zone (between 200-1,000 metres) and into the murky depths of the midnight zone (1,000-4,000 metres).

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