Arctic Natural Climate and Environmental Changes and Human Adaptation: From Science to Public awareness (SciencePub)
Climate models predict that a global warming of 1-5 oC will occur during the next century as a result of projected increases in atmospheric content of greenhouse gases. Warming in the Arctic is expected to be larger than the global mean. However, underlying natural climate variations are not adequately taken into account, and reliable predictions are hampered by lack of data on time scales longer than instrumental records. Arctic climate change takes place in a complex interplay between land, ice sheets, ocean and atmosphere in a manner inadequately understood. During the younger part of the Earth`s history, Arctic environment and climate was characterized by extreme shifts between cold glacial and milder non-glacial periods. Today, there are signs of decreasing sea ice cover, and increasing ocean and air temperatures, i.e. the present warm period moves towards even warmer conditions. Climate models disagree on the relative amount of warming to be expected, and natural variability adds further to this uncertainty. The changes in the Arctic are likely to have global to local effects that will challenge human society. In order to describe and understand the full range of natural climate system behaviour, paleoclimate archives must be studied. Increased knowledge of past natural changes of the physical environment, and the human adaptation to these changes is essential for the planning of future management strategies that governments will have to make.
SciencePub aims to answer two critical questions in current Arctic climate research: What characterizes natural climate change in the Arctic, and how did early pioneer immigrants relate to climate change? By studying natural climate archives in terrestrial and marine sediments from Svalbard, N Norway, NW Russia and adjoining seas we will advance the knowledge on processes operating during non-glacial and glacial periods. We will use this to reconstruct past changes in the climate, and the physical environment during the last interglacial-glacial cycle. This will be used to gain new insight into human immigration and adaptation strategies at the end of the last glaciation. Our cross-institutional and multidisciplinary team will use both new and well-established methods to extract quantitative and qualitative paleoclimate data to explore the interplay between the Arctic land, ocean, ice sheets and early human settlement. We will investigate modern and past land-ocean environments, including:
- variability in the influx of warm Atlantic Water and its implications for growth and decay of ice sheets and ice streams;
- fresh water flux to the ocean through outbursts of ice-dammed lakes and re-routing of NW Russian rivers;
- early human responses to rapid changes in sea-level and temperatures at the end of the last glaciation, and
- models of the human pioneer adaptations and settlement
SciencePub will strive to leave a lasting legacy of increased public awareness of the natural environmental system of the Arctic through outreach activities. These will include networking information officers from all partner institutions, training of science journalists, and by developing visualizations and mobile exhibitions.
Read more at the project's website.
Project lead: Eiliv Larsen, NGU
Participants: Dorthe Klitgaard Kristensen, Arto Miettinen, Nalân Koç
Contact: Nalân Koç