2000

Images-Norway

1. The Norwegian Images consortium

• The consortium consists of researchers from the following institutions:
• Univ. of Bergen
• Univ. of Oslo
• Univ. of Tromsø
• University Studies on Svalbard (UNIS)
• Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø
• Norwegian Geological Survey, Trondheim

The membership is operated via the University of Bergen, which operates a grant from the Norwegian Research Council on behalf of the institutions.

2. Current activities:

The activities in Norway are naturally concentrated on post cruise work on the cores obtained on the Images V/MD 99 cruise. 6 PIs, 4 post docs, 7 Ph D students and 7 MSc students are involved in postcruise research on the cores. The community is very satisfied with the cruise and despite post cruise work being still in its infancy, very interesting results are coming out.

3. Images work in Norway is funded by 2 major national projects:

NORPAST- is a large national co-ordinated paleoclimate project. NORPAST focusses on improving proxy methods for paleoclimatology to improve quantitative reconstructions of clime. It primarily focusses on the Holocene and on millennnial scale rapid climate variability. It has both terrestrial and marine components.

NOClim - is a new multidisciplinary program of assessing how processes in the high latitude North Atlantic Ocean and the Nordic Seas influence climate change. The main focus is in physical oceanography, but there are two paleo-elements:

1. Highly detailed studies of the Y.Dryas and H4 events aimed at resolving phasing of sub-systems (ice sheet-surface/deepocean-atmosphere) as well as possible geographical phases during rapid changes of the THC.
2. Detailed records of ocean variability in the Northernmost North Atlantic and the Nordic Seas at decadal scale for the last 1000 years, and a calibration to the instrumental record. Some studies are also funded by European and other Research Council sources as well as oil industry sources which partly overlap with these projects or which cover other aspects of Images relevant studies.

As a contriubution towards the EPILOG activities we have produced a revision of the LGM SST assesments of the Nordic Seas and NE Atlantic based on oxygen isotopes. A paper will be submitted this semester. Although work is primarily going on in the high Northern latitude Atlantic region and the Arctic, there is also activity in Antarctica on studies of millennial scale climate change close to the ice margin in the Wedell Sea region. This work supplements our ODP work in the South Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean.

• A proposal for a 3 year long renewal of the Images membership has been submitted to the Research Council. A decision is due in November 2000.
• A new 10 year long climate research program plan is being drafted. It is quite sure that Images activities will be one of the priority research fields in this plan.

4. Future interests:

The Norwegian Community is very interested in being involved in the Southern Ocean activities planned for 2002/2003. We would like to become involved in a planning group and will seek national funding to contribute to the cost of the operations, although possibly on a somewhat lower level than in 1999.

We are also keen to see an Ice-Ocean interaction working group being formed to exploit the results of the successful Images V cruise and develop further plans. These may also include work in the Arctic.

There is evolving interest in looking at low-to high latitude couplings and teleconnections especially in the Atlantic. Future Images research may involve a stronger emphasis on these issues.

A new 77 m long research vessel is under construction. A 25-30 m coring system of the Calypso type and a deep water multibeam system have been put into the design of the ship. Final funding decisions are imminent.