Research campaign in the Arctic
The University of Barcelona organizes a new scientific campaign in the Arctic, which will start on June 26. The objective is to study whether the recent climate tendencies in Greenland —temperature rise and acceleration of ice loss— respond to a pattern that had been recorded other times in previous millenniums, or whether they correspond to the amplified effects of climate change in the planet. The campaign is part of the NEOARCTIC project, led by Marc Oliva, tenured university lecturer at the Department of Geography of the UB.
The University of Barcelona organizes a new scientific campaign in the Arctic, which will start on June 26. The objective is to study whether the recent climate tendencies in Greenland —temperature rise and acceleration of ice loss— respond to a pattern that had been recorded other times in previous millenniums, or whether they correspond to the amplified effects of climate change in the planet. The campaign is part of the NEOARCTIC project, led by Marc Oliva, tenured university lecturer at the Department of Geography of the UB.
The researchers will stay in the Arctic during July and August. Specifically, they will work in the area of Greenlandʼs polar ice cap and in the northern area of Ellesmere Island, at the northern end of Canada. Among the tasks to carry out, they will reconstruct the climate variability of the last millennia in these northern regions after the study of the sediments of the lakebeds, and determining the advances and regressions of glaciers as a response to the changing climate conditions. Another objective of the campaign is to understand the geo-ecological changes in the soils, waters, and the plants that are taking place in the melting edges in Greenlandʼs polar ice cap. About 20% of Greenland does not have ice this surface without ice is expected to increase over the next decades.
NEOARCTIC - “Reconstruction of Neoglacial oscillations and climate variability in Greenland and Iceland” is a project by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness led by the Department of Geography of the UB. The organization of this summerʼs campaign, which counts on the support from the Vice-rectorʼs Office of Research of the UB, includes the participation of researchers from the UB, CSIC, CREAF, the University of Santiago de Compostela, the University of Valladolid, the European Centre for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geosciences (France) and the Laval University (Quebec).