Greenland science expedition aims to unveil critical climate insights
This week (Friday 19 July) the UK’s polar research vessel the RRS Sir David Attenborough makes its first science expedition to the Arctic. A team will work in south-east Greenland to advance our understanding of the region’s rapidly decaying ice sheet and its impacts on ocean and global climate systems.
Led by an interdisciplinary team of 40 scientists and support staff from renowned research institutes worldwide, the KANG-GLAC project will embark on a six-week mission to study Greenland’s glaciers and life in coastal waters around the edge of the world’s largest island.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is decaying at an accelerating rate in response to climate change. Warm Atlantic waters moving through fjords eventually meet the ice fronts of marine-terminating glaciers, increasing melting and causing icebergs to break off. In turn, the injection of increased fresh meltwater into the ocean is altering both ocean currents and marine ecosystems around Greenland and farther afield in the North Atlantic, with potential effects on UK weather systems.
The KANG-GLAC project aims to determine the intricate processes driving these changes by studying what is happening now and during warm climatic periods in the past. Researchers can help anticipate future ice-ocean-marine ecosystem changes by extending the modern observational record back through the last 11,700 years, a period known as the Holocene. This includes a time when summer temperatures in Greenland were 3-5°C warmer than today: the Holocene Thermal Maximum. While some records of Holocene iceberg calving and warm water inflows exist around Greenland, records of how glaciers then decay and the effects on marine productivity over many decades are lacking.”
Dr Kelly Hogan, a marine geophysicist from British Antarctic Survey is Co-lead on the project. She says:
“Our expedition is extremely timely as we are seeing every day in the news how the Arctic is changing, and we know there will be knock-on effects for the rest of the planet. We need to understand how the Greenland Ice Sheet is likely to decay over the coming decades to centuries, and what the subsequent effects will be on both ocean currents and marine food webs. This is now urgent information for us to gather so policymakers can understand what will happen in the North Atlantic and set out appropriate adaptation and mitigation plans.”
This three-and-a-half year project will generate records of glacier, ocean, and ecosystem change for the Holocene era at key sites close to Kangerlussuaq Fjord in SE Greenland. The team includes a mix of researchers – including oceanographers, biologists and geologists – who will collectively use a range of instruments to retrieve samples from rocks on land, from the ocean, and from the seafloor to gain a comprehensive picture of this region and its current and potential future response to environmental change.
Using state-of-the-art capabilities of the RRS Sir David Attenborough and deploying advanced underwater robotics such as the Gavia, operated by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), the team will investigate modern interactions between meltwater expelled from glaciers and the inflowing warm ocean waters, as well as how this affects primary productivity in Greenland’s fjords and coastal seas.
In parallel, marine sediment cores from the seafloor and terrestrial rock samples collected using helicopters deployed from the ship will reveal changes in glacier size, ocean temperatures, and carbon storage at the seafloor all changed during the Holocene.
Professor Colm O’Cofaigh, a glacial and marine geologist from the Department of Geography, Durham University, is Co-Lead on the project. He says:
“Understanding the Holocene record of Greenland Ice Sheet change and the role of the ocean thereon is crucial for placing current observations of ice and ocean change into their longer-term context and for underpinning predictions of future change. The range of tools to be deployed from the RRS Sir David Attenborough during the KANG-GLAC cruise provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess this change over the last 11,700 years.”
The KANG-GLAC project is in contact with the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources to share data from the project. The RRS Sir David Attenborough’s expedition to Greenland is part of the UK’s efforts to work more closely with Greenland on scientific research, including through the UK-Greenland science bursaries programme, which to date has funded more that 20 joint research projects with £500,000 (4.4 million DKK). Later this summer, the British research vessel the RRS James Cook will dock in Nuuk, where a programme of engagements is being planned.
