The REnland Ice CAp Project (RECAP) project

Field work april-july 2015

The Renland ice cap is situated in Eastern Greenland on a high elevation plateau on the Renland peninsula in the Scoresbysund fjord.

Climatic conditions on the Renland ice cap are strongly influenced by the varying Arctic sea ice export along Greenland’s east coast. An ice core from the Renland ice cap is thus perfectly suited for obtaining information on Eastern Greenland climatic conditions including the export of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean for the past 100,000 years.

The RECAP ice core drilled to bedrock will be the backbone of a coordinated science program between Denmark, Germany and the U.S. The shallowness of the Renland ice cap furthermore assures that it does not have a brittle ice zone in the Holocene ice like the Greenland ice sheet. The RECAP ice core can therefore yield the first continuous Holocene profiles of gasses and chemical impurities extracted from Greenland. More information on the RECAP project can be found here.

Strong affiliation with ice2ice

The main goal of the RECAP project is to retrieve and analyze a high quality ice core from the Renland ice cap, drilled all the way to bedrock.
A 7 mill. kr Sapere Aude grant from the Danish Research Council to Associate Professor Bo M. Vinther, who is also a PI in the ice2ice project, funds the Danish contribution to RECAP. The US National Science Foundation and the Alfred Wegener Institute provide air support for RECAP, while the project logistics and drilling is managed by the Centre for Ice and Climate, Denmark

While the project is not directly part of ice2ice the RECAP project will enhance the outcome of ice2ice beacuse the proximity of the ice core to the Arctic ocean and the sea ice edge will enhance our knowledge on past sea ice concentrations. Further ice2ice NBI participants also participate in the RECAP project also primary investigator of the RECAP project is Bo M. Vinther who is also a PI in the ice2ice project.

RECAP news and Field diaries

Field work will start in May 2015 and participants paid by the ice2ice project include: Niccolo Maffezioli (PhD), Iben Koldtoft (PhD), Christian Panton (PhD), Lars Berg Larsen (logistics), Bo M. Vinther (professor). You can keep updated with the field work in the diaries from the RECAP project.