During the first leg of the Ice2Ice 2015 cruise the team was joined by the German tv production company Along Mekong Productions who have kindly sent us this beautiful video. It provides the viewer with a bird’s eye perspective of the cruise. You can read more about the cruise here and here.

The ice2ice cruise with RV G O Sars is now well into its second week, reports chief scientist Eystein Jansen from the ship.

The cruise has the ambition to retrieve sediments that can document abrupt changes in sea ice and ocean circulation along the East Greenland continental margin, both in glacial times and in the more recent past. For this purpose a suite of different sediment coring systems are used, bringing up to 20 m long sediment cores containing muddy sediments from the ocean floor to the ship´s deck. A scientific crew of scientists and students, supported by a ship crew of 15 work on 24 hour shifts. On board, all sediment sequences are logged and described so that the science party can get an initial feel for the quality and utility of the samples they retrieve, before they are brought to shore for much more detailed analyses.

A series of excellent cores have so far been retrieved. Weather has been great so far, and the team can enjoy whale watching and the midnight sun on their watches. They are well catered for by the ship´s steward. The main problem so far is that there is still signifiant sea ice quantities drifting along the coast which makes access to some of the planned sites difficult or impossible.

We are, however, quite optimistic that we will end up with very good material for the project reports Jansen from the Greenland Sea.

 

In the ice2ice project we are looking for a PhD candidate that will contribute to the understanding of the stability of Arctic sea ice during cold climates of the past as well as future warm climates. The position is for 3 years and the candidate is expected to conduct a research stay of 6 months at one of the ice2ice partner institutions in Copenhagen.

Read more about and apply for the position here.

The ice2ice project is financed under the so-called Synergy Grant scheme from the European Research Council (ERC). Recently representatives of the ERC met with more than 20 members of the ice2ice project and were given the message that the ERC Synergy Grant was the perfect instrument to implement the project.

Currently there are 24 synergy grant projects financed from the ERC. The governing body of the ERC, the Scientific Council, has decided to evaluate the funding scheme and has therefore requested to meet with the granted projects.

The chair of the synergy assessment working group, Professor Sierd Cloetingh, emphasized that ice2ice was the first project that the evaluation committee would meet with. The outcome of the evaluation process will be a decision by the ERC Scientific Council whether there will be new calls for synergy grants under Horizon 2020.

 

ice2ice made possible with ERC Synergy Grants

The assessment committee members were left with a clear message that ice2ice could not be implemented in the current form without the ERC Synergy Grant scheme. The grant,12,5 million euro over 5 years, and the freedom and focus on the scientific idea allows for the different teams to form around the excellent staff at the 4 different institutions involved in ice2ice. The legacy of the project will also be the training of the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers.

Asked whether the project had got off to a good start, Eystein Jansen, one of the 4 Principal Investigators of ice2ice, stressed that it had been smooth sailing so far.  As an example, the teams have during the last months been busy recruiting more than half of the 24 PhDs and Post.docs. that will be funded by the project. Benefitting from the early international visibility of the project, also benefitting from the “exclusiveness” of the ERC Synergy Grant, there has been a vide international interest for the positions posted so far.

 

 

This summer a group of ice2ice scientists are organizing a cruise with the Norwegian research vessel G.O. Sars. The purpose of the cruise is to collect marine sediments in the Eastern Nordic Seas and along the East Greenland margin. This will allow for an update of existing core material with high-resolution records and to obtain material for direct correlation with results from the Renland ice-core records.

The ship will leave from Reykjavik on 19th of July and the group will start the collection of samples on the Icelandic shelf west of Reykjavik. The cruise will continue westwards and coring some deep sea areas between Iceland and Greenland. Finally the boat heads towardsthe Scoresby Sund area and several transects on the East-Greenland shelf down to ca 2500 m will be cored. The cruise ends in Tromsø on 15th August.

Contact Jørund Strømsøe (Jorund.Stromsoe@uni.no) if you would like aditional information about the cruise.