The Principal Investigator will attempt to define and date the highly-debated southeastern margin of the latest Barents-Kara Ice Sheet. The uncertain configuration of this major Northern Hemisphere marine-based ice sheet results in striking discrepancies in global models of ice and sea-level distribution at and after the Last Glacial Maximum. A major question is related to the southeast extent of the Barents-Kara Ice Sheet. It is unclear whether Late Weichselian ice advanced onto the coasts of western Siberia and Pechora lowland. He surmises that the ice-sheet limits should be investigated on the shelf of the Barents and Kara Seas south and east of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.
The Principal Investigator will organize a Russian-American oceanographic program to retrieve geophysical and sedimentary records from the Pechora Sea and southwestern Kara Sea of time-constrained ice-sheet development and postgacial environmental history. The goal will be to build a comprehensive characterization of the glacier-marginal zone by seismic, side-scan, and penetration sonar profiling, and recover long sediment cores in key locations. Sediment records will be analyzed for lithological, paleobiological, and geochemical proxies supported by rigorous chronostratigraphic control. He anticipates identifying: 1) the marginal position of the last glaciation, 2) the timing of its culmination and the speed of retreat, and 3) major (extreme) events in the evolution of postglacial environments in the southern Barents and Kara seas. Although he does not plan to do a detailed study of the late Holocene, he can use accumulated data to investigate recent climatic change in the Eurasian Arctic.
