Shifting Climate States of the Polar Regions - field campaign at Svalbard 2014

This cross-disciplinary proposal will collect and produce data on glacier and climate variability throughout the last 10 000 years, a research effort that will be carried out at Svalbard. Arctic lakes represent natural systems that are particular sensitiv e to climate change and the sites chosen for this purpose are also located in areas that are witnessing rapid ongoing change. After retrieving the lake records the sedimentary archive will be dated, examined for thepra deposits and thereafter different me thods to extract climate history will be applied e.g. biomarkers, glacial sediments, biogeinc silica. This timely project will for instance be able to assess the importance of the observed polar amplification in a historical context because the polar reg ions have already experienced two major warming periods during the current interglacial, one rapid and one slow. SHIFTS will produce a new type of datasets that will be of sufficient quality to test conflicting hypotheses about key dynamic interrelationsh ips between bi-polar land and sea-ice fluctuations, and their potential impacts on regional climate variations. Glacial activity can be detected and quantified through sediment changes in distal glacier-fed lakes. The sediment-cores from each lake will be characterized by invoking multi-proxy analyses, including rock magnetic properties, physical properties and geochemical variations. Age control of the sedimentary sequences will be provided by a suite of dating methods, integrating cosmogenic analyses, l ichenometry, radiocarbon dating, tephra chronology, and geomagnetic palaeointensity. Finally, the interpretations of the multi-proxy data will be validated against recent climate data. The project is a direct outcome of the SFF Workshop "Geology of Svalba rd" and is a follow up field campaign from the SFF strategic grant given to the same group in 2012.