Holocene Marine Climate Evolution and Variability from Multi-Proxy Analyses of High Resolution Shelf Cores in the Northern North Atlantic (West of 20W)

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This award will enable researchers to use a multi-proxy approach to evaluate environmental variability from sites capturing the dynamics between the Arctic and Atlantic environment. The goal of the research is to determine the range, trends, and nature of climate variability in the region during the Holocene. The broad geographic extent of the research strategy is designed to allow evaluation of the influences and complexities of different components of the climate system. Holocene paleoclimate records of centennial temporal resolution will be produced from four long sediment cores recovered in 1999 in contrasting hydrographic settings. The sites include cores from the Labrador Shelf, the Southwest Iceland margin, the North Iceland shelf, and the East Greenland shelf. The sites were exposed to ice-sheet/ocean interactions during the final deglaciation phases of the Laurentide, Greenland, and Iceland ice sheets. Such research would help provide an improved understanding of the dramatic environmental changes being observed in the Arctic today (i.e., marked retreat and thinning of the sea-ice cover and melting and thinning of the Greenland Ice Sheet, increased discharge of the Russian rivers). Whether these current changes are within the range of natural variability, or are unprecedented, can be evaluated by the data preserved in sediment cores and comparing them to a spectrum of cryosphere-ocean interactions in the northern North Atlantic. In summary, this research on high latitude continental margins opens a promising new archive of past climatic variability. The research has broader implications in areas of education and international research co-operation as it will provide a graduate student with a unique opportunity to actively pursue magnesium/calcium temperature calibrations for water temperatures less than 10degrees-Celsius. Successful development of this proxy would be a significant contribution to the field of paleoclimatology.