Assessment of benthic foraminifera as environmental proxy in the Arctic region (ForArc)

The warming over the past couple of decades has been more pronounced in the Arctic than elsewhere on the globe (ACIA, 2004). Although the observational data provide evidence of significant temporal and spatial variability in recent arctic environments, the records are both too short and few to determine the full potential range of variations that the Arctic has experienced in the past and, hence may experience in the future. Unravelling past environmental changes in the Arctic beyond the instrumental records can therefore only be achieved by investigating proxy records. Reconstructing past climate in the Arctic requires proxies that are well understood and sufficently developed to provide reliable environmental and climate records in order to evaluate the ongoing changes with respect to past climate shifts.

The ForArc project aims at advancing benthic foraminifera significantly as proxy indicators of modern and past environments in the fjords and shelves of Svalbard, the Barents Sea and Northern Norway. We aim to advance the knowledge of benthic foraminiferal ecology by quantifying their response to environmental forcing by:

1. Studying living benthic foraminiferal fauna composition and their stable oxygen and carbon isotopic ratios and Mg/Ca ratios
2. Calibrate these data with oceanographic and environmental parameters
3. Provide insight into the microhabitats of living foraminifera and their relationship with micro-environments and their translation to the dead assemblage
4. Develop local transfer functions linking the faunal data to the various environmental parameters
5. Apply our new developed proxy methods in sediment cores in order to reconstruct past environmental changes during the last millennium based on high resolution sediment cores
    

Project leads: Morten Hald, Katrine Husum (University of Tromsø), and Dorthe Klitgaard Kristensen, Norwegian Polar Institute
Participants: Dorthe Klitgaard Kristensen, Patrycja Jernas, Nalân Koç
Contact: Nalân Koç

Cooperating institutions

• University of Tromsø
• Northern Illlinois State University