It has taken a bit of time, but we finally brought together our impressions and movie clips from last year’s Arctic Paleoceanography cruise with the research vessel Kronprins Haakon to the Arctic Ocean.
In late June 2021, we set sail from Longyearbyen to collect surface sediments, long sediment archives, water and plankton samples. We sailed to the Arctic Ocean, north of Svalbard. The ocean is covered there with seasonal sea ice. We collected study materials from the ocean and ocean floor near Nordaustlandet, the Sophia Basin, the Yermak Plateau and the continental shelf east of Svalbard. The samples will be included in an Arctic Surface Sediment DNA database, which we will use to establish new ancient DNA based sea ice proxies. We also recovered gravity cores from 12 stations that can be used to reconstruct the Arctic sea ice history in the Late Quaternary. This work is all planned within the ERC project AGENSI.