|
|
Introduction
A consortium of Danish institutions will in collaboration with international partners establish
and operate an ice camp in the Arctic Ocean, north of Greenland in the Spring of 2009.
The purpose of the Camp is to supply a logistic basis for a number of partly interlinked research
activities exploiting the facility.  The activities span data retrieved from sediments at the sea
floor through the ocean and sea ice to the lower atmosphere. The overarching goal of the project
is to form a basis for assessing the regional response to climate variability and to identify its
role in the Arctic Ocean as a whole, and couplings with the global climate system. In addition,
the project will demonstrate the value of a low cost ice-based platform for future environmental
monitoring of this remote region hardly assessable by other means, e.g. ice-breakers.
The proposal is based on the approved IPY project "Physical and ecological environment of the Arctic
Ocean north of Greenland" (IPY #329). The IPY consortium includes the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI),
The Danish National Space Center (DNSC-DTU), Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the
Greenland Institute of Natural Research (GN) as well at AWI, Scottish Association of Marine Science,
University of Cambridge, University of Bergen, Finnish Institute for Marine Research (FIMR) etc.
Plans and Scientific rationale
One of the major goals for the 4th IPY initiative is to provide a 'snapshot' of the Polar Regions
during the two IPY-years.The present projects aims at presenting this snapshot for the poorly investigated
area north of Greenland by focusing on a number of interrelated research topics that will be able to provide
a unique glimpse of the present and past state of this inaccessible area as well. All these data will be
valuable in understanding and modelling the future of the Arctic Ocean.
|
