Research project Arctic Ocean bottom water temperature and bathymetry
Two key parameters for studies of feedback in the climate system
This proposal aims to investigate two critical parameters for Earth system feedback studies in the Arctic encompassing the last glacial cycle: Arctic Ocean bottom temperatures and bathymetry. The project will analyze existing Arctic Ocean sediment cores using a multiproxy approach to reconstruct bottom paleotemperatures from benthic ostracode and foraminifera trace metal analysis and clumped isotope paleothermometry.
Project description
Paleo-bathymetry will be reconstructed for a set of time slices using the soon to be released Version 3.0 of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) gridded model as a base. Among the known processes with potential to exert large feedbacks on the climate system in the Arctic are carbon-greenhouse gas release from thawing permafrost and destabilized methane hydrates. Quantifying ocean bottom temperatures along the Arctic continental margins and over the shallow continental shelves are hence of critical importance. The key data needed to model the gas hydrate stability zone are: bottom topography, i.e. bathymetry, bottom water temperatures, and sediment temperature gradients. This proposal focuses on the first two of these three parameters in the paleo-domain. The project forms a component of the interdisciplinary SWERUS-C3 Program (Swedish-Russian-US Arctic Ocean Investigation of Climate-Cryosphere-Carbon Interactions) implying that cores taken during the SWERUS-C3 Oden expedition 2014 will be included in the study.
Project members
Project managers
Martin Jakobsson
Professor of Marine geology and geophysics
Members
Carl-Magnus Mörth
Professor of Environmental geochemistry
Helen Coxall
Professor of Marine micropaleontology
