The Lofoten Islands

In August my wife and I joined a party of 20 holiday-makers for a week’s guided walking in the beautiful Lofoten Islands of Northern Norway. (Statistic: The archipelago is around 180km long and sits inside the Arctic Circle between the northern latitudes of 67º and 69º.) The region is home to an ancient fishing industry and the world’s largest cold-water coral reef. It is also embroiled in a national political struggle to exploit the 60 billion barrels of oil reserves thought to be sitting temptingly and accessibly beneath its surrounding waters. The majority of the 24,000 islanders and environmentally-conscious Norwegians, wishing to preserve their traditional way of life, their fish stocks and the islands’ natural beauty, have so far fought off the commercial interests in Oslo pressing to start drilling. We were too late in the year for the midnight sun and too early for the Northern Lights, but we were blessed with abundant sunshine and air temperatures ideal for strenuous walking.

We stayed in the watery town of Svolvaer on the island of Austvågøya. On arrival, we were immediately struck by the pervasive, if gentle, smell of fish until our noses adjusted and we ceased to notice it. From the small balcony adjoining our hotel bedroom we could dangle our feet over the sea and look out across the harbour every evening to watch the imposing Hurtigruten liners dock for short stopovers on their daily sailings up and down the coast of Norway from Bergen in the South to Kirkenes in the far Northeast, close to the Russian border. In the town’s main square there is a large open-air wooden structure, which at first I took to be a tall climbing frame for adventurous youngsters. It is in fact a trellis for hanging out cod to dry in the freezing months of early spring, and there are very many such structures dotted around the town and right across the islands.

The Barents Sea is the main feeding ground for the world’s largest stock of Northeast Atlantic cod. These magnificent fish reach sexual maturity at around 7—11 years, live for up to 25 years and grow to 1.5 meters or more in length. When the urge to procreate comes upon them in early spring, they head south along the Norwegian coast in large shoals, reaching a peak in the period March-April; each year some 40% of all the migrating cod spawn in and around the Lofoten Islands. As soon as they are caught, they are beheaded and hung up on the wooden frames where they rapidly freeze in the dry sub-zero air. During the two months or so of public exposure, they lose 80% of their water content by sublimation, whereupon they are vacuum packed and shipped off to Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Spain to be sold as highly-prized food. We bought some to try and our verdict: it tastes like fried cod from the local chippy eaten cold the following day. As a small business offshoot, the local children are allowed remove the tongues from the heads on  long spikes and sell them as a delicacy to supplement their pocket money.

On our free day – free from guided walking that is -- a group of us took the bus to a nearby town called Henningsvaer. Among its interesting features were an AstroTurf football stadium tightly hemmed in by the sea on three sides, and this handsome building called the Englishman’s Dock.

The building was of particular interest to me because, as a boy during World War II, I was fed daily spoonfuls of cod liver oil and malt to “build me up”; the malt was sweet and made the fish oil more palatable. This ambrosial concoction was manufactured by a British pharmaceutical company called Allen and Hanbury, which in 1903 established a cod-liver oil factory by the dock in Henningsvaer. The original building was destroyed in a British raid in 1941 but has since been lovingly restored and serves as an artists’ cooperative for pottery, photography and glass-blowing. 

During the war, Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany and governed by a puppet regime led by Herr Vidkun Quisling. a Norwegian army officer who collaborated with the Nazis. The British launched a number of naval attacks on Norway in order to tie up the enemy forces defending its 1600 miles of coastline - at its peak there were 300.000 German soldiers maintaining the occupation. One such raid, known as Operation Claymore, was carried out on the Lofoten Islands on 4th March 1941 and took the Germans by surprise. With naval support British commandoes blew up the two cod liver oil factories in Henningsvaer along with another 13 production centres in Svolvaer, and some 800,000 gallons of fish oil went up in smoke, The oil was being shipped to Germany for the extraction of glycerine, a vital ingredient in the manufacture of high explosives. During the raid 18,000 tons of enemy shipping were sunk and, perhaps more importantly, the codebooks and a set of rotor wheels for an Enigma cypher machine were captured, enabling Bletchley Park to provide Allied convoys with intelligence to avoid U-boat concentrations.

Heavy rain marks the spot where you were born

Here’s another story about isotopes, this time in the service of archaeology. Imagine you have a tooth of someone who lived 1000 years ago or more. How could you tell where they came from?

One answer to this question uses the facts that there are two distinct stable isotopes of oxygen (O¹⁶ and O¹⁸), and likewise of two of strontium. It turns out that O¹⁸, having two extra neutrons, is roughly 12% heavier than O¹⁶ and so a water molecule H₂O¹⁸ is likewise heaver than H₂O¹⁶. When rain clouds drive in from the sea, the heavier rain falls first, causing a decreasing gradient in the proportion of O¹⁸ in fresh water and plants as you move inland, and a corresponding gradient in the take-up of the two oxygen isotopes in the teeth of someone growing up there.

A second parameter that distinguishes your region of origin is the proportion of two isotopes of the element strontium. They have 48 and 49 neutrons respectively and their relative proportions in the underlying rocks are mirrored in the top-soil and in the plants that grow there. Ultimately the humans ingest the strontium in the same proportions through the food chain and this can again be measured by the ratio of the two isotopes deposited in their teeth.

Together, the values of these two isotope ratios, for oxygen and strontium, are sensitive enough to locate where the owner of the teeth was raised, on the assumption that most people don’t move far from where they were born until they reach adulthood. This technique was used by Douglas Price and his team at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to shed light on the geographical origins of sacrificial victims cast into the Sacred Cenote, a sink hole in the limestone of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico believed by local Mayans to be the entrance to the underworld. They analysed 40 ancient human teeth recovered from the lake and concluded that half of them were locals, around a quarter had come from somewhat farther afield, and the remainder from places hundreds of kilometres away, in what are now western Honduras and Mexico’s central highlands. (Taken from a report in The Economist, 3rd August 2019.)