Collaborative Research: The Role of Ice Sheet Instability in Marine Carbon and Nutrient Cycling in the Eurasian Arctic

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The Arctic is experiencing some of the fastest and most dramatic changes on Earth in response to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, including rapid reduction of sea ice, retreat of glaciers, and changing ocean circulation patterns. These changes are fundamentally re-organizing Arctic marine carbon and nutrient cycles. The long-term impacts on these cycles are unclear. This project will help us understand how glacial instability impacts ecosystems and ocean chemistry, with potential implications for future changes in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. We will use this project to create educational activities designed to “bring the polar regions to the Southern and Midwest US.” Teaching about Arctic change provides a unique chance to teach students and the general public about the impacts of human-caused climate change. We will also provide research opportunities and mentor students who will help make up the next generation of polar scientists. This project will use the sedimentary record from marine sediments to investigate the links between climate change events and the land-sea-ice exchange pathways of carbon and nutrients within the Eurasian Arctic margin over the past 160 thousand years. The sedimentary record from locations on the Yermak Plateau and Barents Sea slope documents significant perturbations to carbon and nutrient cycles including multiple abrupt sediment delivery events with distinct geochemical and sedimentological compositions. We will determine the source and impact of these sediment events to evaluate how marine carbon and nutrient cycles are perturbed by glacial retreat and instability. This project will use clay mineralogy and geochemical (radiogenic isotopes) techniques to reconstruct the changing sources of sediments through time. We will compare these results with geochemical records of carbon and nutrient cycling to determine the impacts of a changing sediment source. At Kent State, project data will be incorporated into new and existing undergraduate curriculum. At UF, polar marine activities will be incorporated into a Florida Museum of Natural History open house.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.