The Arctic countries are unusually dependent on the state of the climate for the livelihood of their societies, use of lands and seas, and exploitation of marine living and non-living resources. Thus climate research has been an important topic for over a century, and many outstanding discoveries of long- and short-term climate change have been made in the Arctic for the first time. These include early contributions to our understanding of the geological effects of continent-wide glaciations during the ice ages, the complex postglacial history of the Circum-Arctic countries and the varved sediment sequences preserved under lakes with an extraordinary seasonality in their sediment input, as well as the detailed records of temperature, ice texture and impurities and greenhouse gas variations of the last Glacial and of the Holocene preserved in the ice cores from Greenland. Iceland with its volcanic sequences and intercalated sediment layers not only preserved the history of this subaerial segment of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, but also easily datable paleoclimate records. The fate of the Vikings who settled during the medieval climate optimum in Iceland and later in Greenland and who lost their habitat in Greenland at the beginning of the Little Ice Age illustrates vividly the climate-dependent subsistence of the indigenous and non-indigenous Arctic populations. Modern Arctic climate research also includes sophisticated modelling and contributions to assessments of future climate scenarios.
This session welcomes presentations on all of the topics discussed here.
Arctic Climate Variability - past to future