"Svalbard - >Hot< Cauldron of Climate Interactions" "AWAKE-2 Arctic Climate System Study of Ocean, Sea Ice and Glaciers Interactions in Sval-bard Area" DARIUSZ IGNATIUK, MARIUSZ GRABIEC University of Silesia in Katowice, Faculty of Earth Sciences Department of Geomorphology, Będzińska 60, 41-200 Sosnowiec e-mail: dariusz.ignatiuk@us.edu.pl, mariusz.grabiec@us.edu.pl Close Encounter of the Third Kind

Description popularizing the research project

When courageous and perseverant sailor and explorer, Willem Barents, set off on his last voyage to the far North of Europe, he had already been there and failed twice. Once he had to return because of unfavourable weather conditions, and once because of impassable ice. Third time he reached Spitsbergen, yet his ship got stuck there. The crew were forced to build a make-shift lodge and winter there, hunting arctic animals. When the conditions improved enough to try to escape from the ice trap, the crew in two boats set off on the way back home. Everybody survived, everybody but one person, the main chief navigator, Willem Barents. What remained of him is the name of one of arctic seas east of Svalbard archipelago.
It has been almost 500 years since Barents' expeditions. All the time the sailing conditions in the Arctic Ocean remained extremely hard as most of the year they were covered with ice. Even today, sailing between Europe, America and Asia, although it is regular, often requires assistance of icebreakers. It is expected that in near future such a voyage will be possible without ships providing safe waterways through ice and floes.
Undisturbed sea voyage beyond the Arctic Circle is one of side effects of global warming. As the temperature gradually goes up, more than the ice cap may change. Effects of the changes are seen in both animate and inanimate environment, especially in interactions between water, land and ice where the three elements mingle together - in the fiords of archipelagos and shores of continents surrounded by the polar circle. Fiords, which like blood vessels, like thin cracks penetrate the land, are the first ones to react to the inflow of warmer oceanic water or fresh water from melting ice. Research conducted in the sensitive areas provides a lot of valuable data to forecast the future of the polar ice cap. Although there are no more unknown lands to discover, we can still discover the fate of the boreal landscape.

Abstract

The aim of AWAKE-2 is to understand the interactions between the main components of the climate system in the Svalbard area: ocean, atmosphere and ice, to identify mechanisms of interannual climate variability and long-term trends. The main hypothesis is that the Atlantic Water inflows over the Svalbard shelf and into the fjords have become more frequent during the last decades due to changes in the ocean and atmosphere. The integrated effect of these events results in new regimes and changes in the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and glaciers in Svalbard. Furthermore, changes in the cryosphere and geosphere create feedback effects in the ocean and atmosphere. A dedicated, multidisciplinary approach to achieve the project's aims will be adopted by carrying out the coordinated meteorological, oceanographic, glacio-logical and geophysical observations in Hornsund, on the adjacent shelf and the open sea. Being a link between the land and the ocean, Arctic fjords are highly vulnerable to warming and are expected to exhibit the earliest environmental changes resulting from the anthropogenic impact on the climate. In the Arctic, the inshore boundary of a fjord system is usually dominated by glaciers and seasonal freshwater input while its offshore boundary is strongly influenced by warm oceanic waters. Improved understanding of the fjords-ocean exchange and processes within Arctic fjords is of a highest importance because their response to atmospheric, oceanic and glacial variability provides a key to understand the past and to forecast the future of high latitude glaciers and Arctic climate. The synthesis will build on the first AWAKE and combine the new interdisciplinary AWAKE-2 results with other existing data into new and improved knowledge of the critical interconnections between atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere.
Project contractor (Faculty of Earth Sciences, University of Silesia, Poland): Dr Mariusz Grabiec, prof. Jacek A. Jania, dr inż. Małgorzata Błaszczyk, dr Dariusz Ignatiuk, mgr Tomasz Budzik

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