We’ve all been there—scrolling through eBay or stopping at a roadside antique store, sorting through jewelry and thinking: “What if I find a really valuable antique in here?”
Most of the time, that doesn’t happen. But a young Norwegian woman, Mari Ingelin Heskestad, found herself living out that dream when she purchased a collection of cheap jewelry from an online auction house, only to notice one object stuck out.
Heskestad had an inkling the twisted gold ring was something unique. “It was really heavy, and shiny,” she told the newspaper Bergensavisen, BA. “It looked very special.”
But instead of bringing it straight to a dealer or auction house to cash in, she delivered it to the municipal cultural heritage department of Vestland County, in Western Norway.
Karoline Hareide Breivik, the acting head of the department, confirmed in a statement that the ring dated to the late Iron Age or Viking Age.
She noted that the find was extremely rare; it also marked the first time she was aware of a ring from the Scandinavian Viking Age having been found in an online auction.
“We’re so impressed with her—the fact that she reacted exactly as you should when you find something you might believe is of historic value,” Sigrun Wølstad, a senior advisor to the county, told Science Norway. READ MORE...
Cities like Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen are working to clean up one of the world's most high-emission industries.Quiet, clean and green are not words you would typically use to describe a construction site. But the site at Olav Vs gate, one of the busiest streets in the heart of Norway's capital city, Oslo, was special. In a first of its kind in the world, all the machinery used on site – excavators, diggers and loaders – were electric.
Work began on the site in September 2019, converting what was once a hectic turning zone for the city's taxis into a new pedestrianised area. Locals may have initially raised eyebrows at what appeared to be just another inconvenient construction site, but soon it was clear there something very different about it. In fact, this was a pilot project for the first zero-emission urban construction site in the world.
"When I visited the zero-emission construction site I was extremely impressed," says Mark Preston Aragonès, a policy advisor at environmental non-profit Bellona. "I was looking at these big excavators that you generally associate with fumes and noise and general annoyances, but on this site, when the operator turned it on you couldn't tell the difference between when it was on or off. It was really impressive to see such big machines make such little noise."
Decarbonising the construction industry is something in which Oslo wants to lead the world. And it's with good reason
Using electric equipment in place of traditional diesel engines meant that everyone in the vicinity noticed a reduction in ambient noise and pollution. "We observed shops keeping their doors open towards the street, even when construction work was going on just outside on the pavement," says Philip Mortensen, a senior adviser at the City of Oslo's Climate Agency. "The workers also reported much better communication on site due to lower noise levels, and that as a consequence the working environment felt safer." TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
