International workshop "Correlation of post-glacial climatic events in the Arctic and Far-East Seas"

Moscow, April 17 - 20, 2000

The main target of the workshop was to bring together Russian and foreign scientists involved in high-resolution climatic and paleoceanographic studies in the Russian Arctic and Far East seas, to discuss the new results and to make preliminary paleoclimatic correlations between different seas. The Workshop was organized by Russian participants of IMAGES (M.A. Levitan, chairman; I.O. Murdmaa, M.S. Barash, and E.V. Ivanova, members of the Organizing Committee), by the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology RAS and by the Working group "Stratigraphy", Council of the World Ocean problems RAS; and was funded by IMAGES. One of the sessions was combined with the meeting of Russian-German Program KOMEX. In total, more than 40 scientists from several Russian and foreign institutions took part in the Workshop sessions. 29 reports were presented, about one third of which contained results of co-operative Russian-French, Russian-American and Russian-German research.

The joint Russian-French team (Duplessy et al., Levitan et al.) presented a millenium to century scale Holocene paleoceanographic records from Barents and Kara seas revealing the history of climate-related Atlantic water inflow (Fig.1) and local events linked to sea level changes. A high-resolution sedimentary record from the Russkaya Gavan' fjord (Novaya Zemlya) reflects migration of Shokal'sky glacier front related to climatic oscillations during the past millenium, including the Little Ice Age (Murdmaa et al.). I.A.Andreeva with co-authors (VNIIOkeangeologiya, St. Petersburg) presented a detailed Late Holocene sedimentary record from the Kola Bay.

Figure 1. Local d18O changes in the planktonic species Neogloboquadrina pachyderma left coiling and the benthic species Elphidium clavatum versus age in core ASV 880 (79°55'5 N, 47°08'2 E, water depth 388 m). The approximate temperature scale has been established assuming that the core top reflects modern conditions and that the water temperature decreases by 1°C when the foraminifer d18O value increases by 0.25‰ (Shackleton 1974) (figure from Duplessy et al., Boreas, in press). Full reference: JEAN-CLAUDE DUPLESSY, ELENA IVANOVA, IVAR MURDMAA, MARTINE PATERNE AND LAURENT LABEYRIE Holocene paleoceanography of the Northern Barents Sea and variations of the northward heat transport by the Atlantic Ocean

A series of reports by the KOMEX team from the Pacific Institute of Oceanology (Vladivostok) and from German institutions demonstrated new results on the Late Quaternary paleoceanography of the Chukchi Sea, Bering Sea and - especially - of the Sea of Okhotsk, including tephrochronology, micropaleontology, climatostratigraphy, stable isotopes, radiocarbon datings, ice-rafted debris, geochemical and mineralogical proxies (A.Abelmann, A.B. Astakhov, M.S. Barash, N. Biebow, S.A. Gorbarenko, A. Kaiser, A., S.B.Kruglikova, A.G. Matul, R. Thiedemann, and others).

Some authors attempted to correlate the major Holocene and Late Pleistocene paleoclimatic events in different Arctic and Far East areas (A.A.Svitoch, Yu.A. Pavlidis, , Ye.I.Polyakova, and others) to link those with global changes and orbital signals. During the discussion, participants of the Workshop noted a considerable progress in the high-resolution Holocene paleoceanography and paleoclimatology of most Russian Arctic and Far East seas, except for the East Siberian Sea, which still represents a gap in our knowledges. New statistical approaches were also discussed (M.S.Barash and I.G.Yushina). All participants approved the fruitful discussion, and pointed to the importance of international co-operation in paleoceanographic studies of such key regions as marginal seas surrounding the Russian landmass within the IMAGES project.

M.Levitan, I.Murdmaa, E.Ivanova