We are excited to share an update on our recent fieldwork in Arctic Greenland. As part of the NEOCLIM project led by Santiago Giralt from GEO3BCN-BCN, in April 2024, our team cored few lakes located around 100 km North of Ilulisat in the Nuussuaq peninsula of Greenland. The NEOCLIM project is a component of the larger NEOARCTIC project funded by the Spanish Government. Our main goal is to investigate climate variability during the Neoglacial period (ca. the last 5000 years) in the Arctic, focusing on the connections between the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which influence climate variability in Europe and beyond. Our research is not just about understanding the past but also about predicting and preparing for the future. It is known that polar regions’ climate changes can significantly affect Earth’s future climate, leading to far-reaching consequences for climatic, environmental, and socio-economic conditions in regions at mid and low latitudes.
TEBLab is collaborating with the NEOARCTIC project to use a palaeoecological approach to study how freshwater communities have assembled since deglaciation. We aim to understand how these isolated ecosystems have responded to past climate variability during the Holocene and current global change factors such as climate, deglaciation processes and atmospheric pollution. We focus on understanding the factors, including the passage of time and the regional environmental settings, that drive the fate of these communities by studying changes in their composition and structure and determining what could be expected under natural (pre-anthropogenic) environmental variability.
Our recent fieldwork on the Nuussuaq peninsula in the Arctic region was not just physically demanding, but also a testament to our team's dedication and expertise. We operated in temperatures at our base camp that ranged from -24 to 1°C, with intermittent daily snowfall and occasional strong winds. With our corer device, we had to cross ca. 2 meters of snow (ca. 60 cm) and ice cover (ca. 150 cm) to reach the lake water surface. The snow cover showed some layers indicating periods of melting during winter. Despite these challenging conditions, our team and our expert guide, Pizarranya, made it relatively easy thanks to our perfect coordination in sampling sedimentary records and extensive experience working together. We successfully recovered sediment records from two relatively large lakes in the area, observing glacial clay at the bottom of the sediment cores, which is an essential finding for both the NEOARTIC project and TebLab's research objectives.
During our fieldwork, we observed some of the region’s wildlife, including a couple of crows (Corvus corax) daily, a flock of snow geese (Anser caerulescens) flying towards the SW, and a few tracks likely from reindeer on the lake.
Stay tuned for further updates and insights from our ongoing research endeavours!
Author
Sergi Pla Rabes, Researcher