The Old & Cold project is about an ice-cold shark that can live to be hundreds of years old – the Greenland shark. It can grow up to 6 metres long and lives in the dark, cold waters around Greenland and Canada where it can dive to depths of up to 2 kilometres.
Old & Cold studies the life of the Greenland shark, the genetic composition of the population and its movements. The aspects studied include the age of the Greenland shark, the size of the population and how far they swim. State-of-the-art technology within DNA sequencing, satellite tagging and isotope mapping are being used to gather new knowledge about an animal considered by fishermen to be a pest, but which we know very little about.
Read also: 10 questions for Greenland shark experts (in Danish)
The new knowledge generated by the project is also important for assessing whether the Greenland shark is threatened and how it may be affected by commercial fishing.
Duration: Three-year PhD project (2014-2017).
Read more about research into the Greenland shark in this blog (in Norwegian)
Partners: John Fleng Steffensen, Marine Biological Section, University of Copenhagen, Julius Nielsen, PhD student, the Greenland Nature Institute, Indiana University South Bend, USA and the Arctic University of Tromsø, Norway.