Changes at the Top of the World through Volcanism and Plate Tectonics: Arctic Norwegian-Russian-North American collaboration (NOR-R-AM2)

The NOR-R-AM project gathers scientists from Norway, Russia, USA, and Canada who aim to build a knowledge platform for assessing the current understanding about Arctic geology. As the Solid Earth sciences are sometimes overlooked in polar sciences we aim to bridge this gap by continuing to establish, maintain and build the profile of Arctic-related geosciences and international visibility through collaboration. We have coordinated and taught the UiO Summer School online course ?A Changing Arctic? in July 2021, we study and disseminate knowledge about the Iceland plume and its impact on the Arctic region, and continue to develop new online course material and a digital database for Arctic geology and geophysics. Together with our collaborators we use our new results and regional databases to educate undergraduate, Master and PhD students. Field trips and international travel is postponed to 2022. Our projects goal is consistent with UArctics mandate - cooperation in education, research and outreach in the North, to forge global partnerships.

CEED and the Department of Geosciences (GEO) at the University of Oslo have now the desired critical mass to be considered the largest Norwegian hub for Arctic solid earth sciences, which span from sedimentary basin analysis, geodynamics, volcanism and links with the Deep Earth, and connects to glaciology and ocean and climate evolution. We propose to use the existent Arctic research and education platform built at the University of Oslo (CEED and GEO) and UNIS (Svalbard) and, together with our partners from Canada, Russia and USA to develop an Arctic-centred project that will target the entire Arctic geoscience community and will educate the new generation of students interested in Arctic’s present and past natural environments. NOR-R-AM2 will add to the activities started during NOR-R-AM1 which supported the formation of an international group from Arctic countries (Norway, Russia, USA and Canada) whose participants (1) work towards a common scientific goal , (2) have established a new joint-graduate courses where their research topics are communicated to the new generation of geoscientists and (3) will continue to identify, plan and develop future large, collaborative research initiatives in the Arctic. The main goals of this project will be: (1) to complete and launch the digital Circum-Arctic platform building on the NOR-R-AM1 results, (2) to improve the curriculum of the UNIS course on Arctic Tectonics and Volcanism (10 ECTS) which combines field work with the digital Circum-Arctic platform, (3) to involve the students in advanced studies of seismology and geochronology by using the state-of-the-art data and methods developed by our partners in Canada and USA by organising short courses and common projects, and (4) to advance our knowledge on Arctic’s paleogeography and paleoclimate by using geological knowledge and complementary proxies analysed by ALL NOR-R-AM partners.