Project Summary: Since 2003, the Principal Investigators have been administering a summer REU site on the Svalbard archipelago for motivated geoscience undergraduate students in important climate change research and exposes them to the challenges and rewards of conducting high latitude research. They will be funded to continue the Svalbard REU program for another five years and to expand the scope of the program on how climate influences the modern glacial, fluvial lacustrine, and fjord systems. By studying these modern processes, they will establish reliable transfer functions between sedimentation and meteorological, glaciological and oceanic variables that will allow the sediment record to be better interpreted as a high-resolution record of late Holocene climate change. The students are integrally involved in defining their research questions and designing specific testable hypotheses throughout the program. They will complete their research projects at their home institutions during the following academic year.
Intellectual Merit: The Arctic is an area of active research because it is highly sensitive to climate change and because climatically induced environmental changes in this region can instigate further changes of global consequence. Recently published data indicate that the Arctic is warming much faster than lo*wer latitudes and even greater rates of change and ecosystem disruption are predicted with the continuing decay of the Arctic Ocean pack ice. Svalbard is strongly influenced by the northern end of the warm Gulf Stream current, and therefore its climate is sensitive to changes in global scale oceanic circulation. Svalbard has warmed considerably during the last 90 years and climate proxies indicate even greater Holocene climate variability. Despite this, little is known of sub-century climate change and virtually nothing is known of decadal scale variability in this Arctic region. This project has initiated long term monitoring of the rapidly changing Arctic cryospheric/hydrosphere that will facilitate interpretation of high-resolution proxy records from the Svalbard region.
Broader Impacts: This project benefits society by recruiting and training the next generation of Arctic researchers, and our modern process studies will directly improve predictive models of future climate change by strengthening the link between climate processes and climate proxies. They have and will continue to make every effort to recruit students from diverse populations and from institutions lacking in-house research opportunities. The Principal Investigators, undergraduate participants, and participating K-12 teachers will continue to make frequent and wide-reaching outreach to public audiences on Arctic climate change issues and the importance of science education, increasing awareness of Arctic environmental change in K-12 classrooms around the world. This project expands existing collaborations with international institutions, and the Principal Investigators are developing exciting new collaborations through International Polar Year (IPY) efforts and the circum-Arctic UArctic educational consortium.
