Uni Research Klima
The Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen has a very nice 2 page article on the ice2ice project. The interview with Principal Investigator Eystein Jansen focusing on abrupt changes in the Arctic climate.
Project partners can find the full text in the ice2ice dropboc
In their last newsletter of 2016 the European Research Council (ERC) puts the spotlight on the ice2ice project and writes: “With an ERC Synergy Grant, Prof. Jansen and three Nordic world class researchers are currently investigating the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice.” The article includes a picture of the flagpole on top of the Renland ice cap in East Greenland that mark the multinational effort.
erc-newsletter-winter-2016-feat-ice2ice
Science diplomacy
In October the ERC arranged a conference focusing on how frontier research can contribute to science diplomacy. The conference included a presentation of the ice2ice project presented by the Ice2Ice Coresponding Principal Investigator Eystein Jansen.
In the editorial to the newsletter, Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission, writes “Scientific cooperation in the Arctic can help stabilise an area where there is much potential for collaboration as there is for competition.”
ERC to reinstate Synergy Grants call
ERC has also announced that they will open another call for Synergy Grants and there is an article covering this in the newsletter. In 2014, the Scientific Council established an ad hoc group tasked with assessing the outcomes of the two synergy calls. In March last year ice2ice was the first project that the evaluation committee would meet with and we believe that this meeting has strongly contributed to the fact that the group recommended reinstating the synergy grant scheme.
Based on the groups findings the ERC President stated: “The Synergy Grants awarded so far have shown that this funding fosters interdisciplinary research and can trigger unconventional collaborations, allowing for the emergence of new fields of study. They will contribute significantly to fill a gap in EU funding for frontier research.” The decision to open another Synergy Grants call is welcomed by the Ice2ice team.
For the first time an international group of scientists will drill a deep ice core into a fast flowing ice stream on Greenland. The international project EastGRIP, is lead by Ice2Ice parter Centre of Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.
During the summer of 2016 a team of researchers and students built the base on the ice stream in northeast Greenland, started a comprehensive scientific surface field campaign, and initiated the ice core drilling.
The aim of the project is to better understand the dynamics and properties of the fast flowing ice stream. By the time they reach bedrock in the year 2020, the team will have extracted nearly 2700m of Greenland ice giving a 100,000 year old climate archive.
The end of summer in Bergen has seen a spiked interest from Norwegian media towards the work the Ice2Ice project is conducting.
On 30August the Norwegian national broadcaster NRK included a great news segment dedicated The East Greenland Ice-core Project (EastGRIP) . During the 2 minute segment the audience was given a broad overview of the ice coring activity on EastGRIP including on site video of the station activities, interview with Kerim and NASA graphic of the ice streams.
You can watch the clip here (In Norwegian only. Available when the article was posted on 12.9.16)
The Norwegian Financial daily Dagens Næringliv’s weekend Magazine recently had a long and interesting article about the EastGRIP project.
You can read the article here ((In Norwegian only. Available when the article was posted on 26.8.16)
On the 11th and 12th May modelers from Bergen and Copenhagen have met in Bergen to discuss various aspects of coming Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) simulations with our climate models NorESM and EC-Earth, respectively. We have focused on MIS3 38,000 years ago and established the ground work for the participation of further groups in the future.
A big part of the discussion addresses the adequate selection of the global coast line and the ice sheet geometries for the Northern hemisphere. We are going to use the 14 kyrBP ice sheet geometry as a proxy for the 38 kyrBP situation, since both the global sea level and probably also the ice sheet geometry had been similar during these two periods. Furthermore no reliable estimate exists for times before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 21 kyrBP) because the evidence had been overprinted by expanding ice sheet in the time leading into the LGM.
In particular two ice sheet reconstructions have been extensively evaluated: the global, so-called “ICE 6G”, product from Peltier and the estimate form Tarasov for North America. Since only Peltier provides estimate for areas beyond North America, it will be used for these regions. However we have to remove the likely to extensive ice cap in the Barents Sea to be consistent with various sediment cores in this region. This enables our ocean models to simulate a realistic ocean circulation on Asian continental shelf, which is deemed to be important for an adequate representation of the oceanographic conditions in the Arctic. After we get the Tarasov reconstruction data, it will be compared with Peltier’s work. It will lead to the decision if we may use Tarasov’s reconstruction in North America, since it is in accordance with glaciological principles. In general the global coast line is based on the “uplifted” bottom topography caused by the global sea level drop of 70 m.
Often we follow the spirit of the Paleo Model Intercomparison Project (PMIP) protocol, such as we apply the constructed preindustrial vegetation distribution for land points. Hence we do not eliminate any urban region or crop vegetation. Emerging land, due to the fallen sea level, is filled with the vegetation distribution that is typical for the region. A probably more zonal weighted examination may allow keeping the generally observed zonal vegetation alignment. Applied greenhouse gas concentrations are based on ice cores. Astronomical variables present the condition for 38kyr PB, while the solar constant is kept unchanged.
The meeting has been complemented with a video conference meeting with William Roberts, who has help to verify our thoughts. A draft document summarizing the discussion is available on request.
Work tasks:
Qualifications and personal qualities:
The successful candidate will be part of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (http://www.bjerknes.uib.no) and the ice2ice project.
Deadline 2 June. More info and application link here
Story by: Evangeline Sessford, Amandine Tisserand og Sarah Berben
In the basement of Realfagsbygget at the University of Bergen, there are 80 m2 of tubes containing mud, sand and very tiny fossils. All of those tubes are very precious, because they contain important information of our past climate.
The fossils come from tiny animals that lived in the ocean water and when they died, settled to the sea floor of our earth’s oceans. Over time the mud and plankton skeletons accumulated layer by layer, year after year. These separate layers on the ocean floor tell a story in a very similar way to pages of a book, with the beginning of the story at the bottom and the end at the top of the sea floor. In particular, these layers of mud, known as marine sediment, tell us about changes in temperature
, salinity and sea ice from long before we began making observations or using satellites for research.
The ocean mud holds an incredible active archive and story about the natural history of the oceans. It is up to us to open the book and read the pages to understand our Earth’s oceanic history and even more, what it can teach us. This way of studying the ocean´s past is one tool to learn more about the earth’s changing climate system, its dynamics and its environmental impacts.
In the summer of 2015, we set out to the Greenland Sea on board of the G.O. Sars to recover continuous records containing tens of thousands of years of mud. The overall purpose of this research campaign is to unravel the mysteries of the so-called
Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. These events occurred during the last glacial and are associated with rapid temperature increases of up to 15 °C over Greenland taking place within a human lifetime. At the last climate conference (COP21) in Paris, a general agreement was reached to keep the global warming within 1.5 °C within this century.
With this aim in mind we wonder what could potentially happen if a climate warming of 15 °C would make the scene again. If we gain a better understanding of these events and in particular of its triggers, it will be possible to improve our prediction of the future earth´s climate change. Therefore we aim to investigate tens of thousands of years of old mud and see how past changes in ocean and sea ice behavior affected climate.
To recover long, continuous records of marine sediment, we lowered a long tube into the water column until it reached the ocean floor. There, the tube was pushed 20 meters downward into the sediment to capture the separate layers of mud inside the tube, in exactly the same way as they were lying within the ocean´s floor.
The long and thin cylinder of layered marine sediment, called a marine sediment core, shows us distinctive stripes of varied colors and widths. On board the ship, these cores were cut into sections and split in half lengthways. Additionally, we examined them using non-destructive analysis.
After a successful field season, one half of the core will be sampled and further examined by research scientists and students. These cores, and their many layers of mud, reveal a unique record of the changes throughout time at the core location. Their
stories are ready and waiting to be read.
Some of the information has already been extracted! Sarah is using ash from volcanoes that erupted in the past to link the timing between the sediment cores and understand the chronology of the oceanic changes. Evangeline has measured some salinity and circulation changes of the ocean water at the surface and at depth. And Amandine is running the Mg/ca samples to gain insight on the temperature of the water in the past!
As the earth is experiencing global warming today, and many questions remain about the future, looking at the climate changes of the past helps us to understand the climate system.
For example, how high can CO2 go without causing devastating changes in global climate through sea level rise, ice sheet melt, and changing precipitation patterns? Hence, climate research is incredibly relevant to our society and the health of our Earth.
Come with us on a climate adventure through the sneak previews on film and follow us on twitter with #ice2ice.
Ice2Ice members from the Bjerknes Centre recently published an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans titled “Consequences of future increased Arctic runoff on Arctic Ocean stratification, circulation, and sea ice cover.” Here you can read the corresponding author Aleksi Nummelin’s explanation of the key findings in this new article.
By: Aleksi Nummelin
Scenarios with freshwater leading to sluggish currents and less heat being transported to northern high latitudes have been seen as a potential cause for rapid climate changes. In two recent studies we show that while this scenario is plausible in the North Atlantic, the ocean response in the Arctic is quite the opposite.
The scientific narrative of larger freshwater input and weaker ocean circulation is based on the extensive literature on the effects of freshwater on the ocean circulation in the North Atlantic. However, the response in the Arctic has received much less attention and this is what we were after. For simplicity we focused on changes in the river runoff, which is projected to increase as much as 30% by the end of the 21st century.
In our first study (Nummelin et al., 2015a) we used a simple column model and represented the whole Arctic as one vertical profile. In this model we increased the river runoff and found that the heat flux from ocean to the sea ice stays close to constant even though the surface layer freshens, reducing vertical mixing towards the surface from warm Atlantic origin waters at depth. This somewhat counterintuitive result follows from the reduced surface heat flux outside the ice covered areas, which leads to warmer Atlantic Water layer and a modest change in vertical heat flux inside the Arctic.
In our second study (Nummelin et al., 2015b), instead of working with the idealized column model, we wanted to try out something a bit more realistic and we turned into the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM1-M). We chose to force the model with a constant atmospheric state and allowed the ocean and sea ice cover to adjust to increasing Arctic runoff. This more complex model confirmed our previous result and showed that the increase in the runoff leads to warmer Arctic Ocean with very little change in the vertical ocean heat flux under the ice cover. As a result the ocean circulation turned out to be more important for the increase in the sea ice thickness than the changing vertical ocean stratification.
These two studies lead us to conclude (summarized in Figure 1) that while the North Atlantic ocean responds to increasing freshwater input with a slowdown of circulation, reduced heat transport, and a cooling of the ocean, the reduced surface fluxes (i.e. less cooling) further north accommodate the reduction in the ocean heat transport. By the time the Atlantic inflow enters the Arctic the stronger stratification and reduced mixing have lead to slight expansion of the ice cover and much warmer Atlantic water at depth. In fact the ice cover adjust preferably by increase in the ice extent, not by increase in the thickness because the vertical heat flux in the already ice covered areas stays constant due to the warmer ocean at depth.
In our upcoming study we finally apply all the information we have gained from the two previous studies to understand the changes in the Arctic Ocean in the fully coupled atmosphere-ocean simulations during the ongoing century. From the preliminary results it seems that the two most important findings are similar to the idealized studies: first, changes in the North Atlantic have relatively little to do with the changes in the Nordic Seas and the Arctic, and second, ice extent responds to changes in ocean heat transport.
References
Nummelin, A., C. Li, and L. H. Smedsrud (2015a), Response of Arctic Ocean stratification to changing river runoff in a column model, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, 120, 2655–2675, doi:10.1002/2014JC010571.
Nummelin, A., M. Ilicak, C. Li, and L. H. Smedsrud (2015b), Consequences of future increased Arctic runoff on Arctic Ocean stratification, circulation, and sea ice cover, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, 120, doi:10.1002/2015JC011156.
There is a vacancy for a PhD postion at The Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen (http://www.uib.no/geo) within the field of climate dynamics/paleoclimate. The position is for a fixed-term period of 3 years. The successful candidate will be part of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (http://www.bjerknes.uib.no) and the ice2ice project (Arctic Sea Ice and Greenland Ice Sheet Sensitivity) which is an ERC-synergy project with Uni Research, the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Meteorological Institute as partners.
About the project/work tasks
The focus of ice2ice is to investigate the cause and future implications of past abrupt changes in Arctic sea ice and climate on the Greenland ice sheet. The candidate will work within the field of climate dynamics/paleoclimate. The research fellow will work
on proxy based reconstructions and chronology of oceanographic parameters adjacent to Greenland based on geochemistry and microfossils.
As part of the PhD program the candidate is expected to conduct a research stay at the ice2ice partner institution in Copenhagenor at one of the other collaborating institutions in the project.
Qualifications and personal qualities
Closing date for applications: 4 March 2016
More information and application details here:
For four weeks, a scientific crew of scientists and students, supported by a ship crew of 15 have been working on 24 hour shifts. The cruise came to an end as the Research Vessel G.O. Sars anchored in Tromsø, Norway on August 14, after spending weeks in icy waters with icebergs and whales nearby on many occations.
“It has been an eventful and successful cruise” reports cruise leader Eystein Jansen from Tromsø. “We bring with us 200m of sediment cores from the western Nordic Seas and the east Greenland Margin”. Shipboard analyses indicate that the material the scientists bring home to their laboratories cover a time span from the present and probably a few hundred thousand years back in time.
“We have a unique material which we hope will cast new light on rapid changes in sea ice cover and ocean circulation during past times. The cores should be ideal for correlation to the ice cores drilled this summer at Renland in Eastern Greenland by our ice core colleagues from Copenhagen”, says an optimistic cruise leader.”The material is also a unique resource for calibration of our methods to study past sea ice and oceanic changes to modern conditions, and should give us opportunities to compare the changes of the recent past with those occuring today at high time resolution”.
The cruise experienced problems with the quite extensive sea ice cover this summer, but during the cruise the sea ice retreated enough for many sites that were inaccessible at the start of the cruise became sea ice free towards the end.
“Nevertheless we were not able to come into the fjord areas, and those objectives will remain to another option. The project also plans a cruise late next summer, where those possibilities may open up. We also had some problems with the winch system for the long piston coring, but despite of these problems we bring back a nice long core material for the post-cruise studies”, says Jansen.