GRK 1904:  ArcTrain - Processes and Impacts of Climate Change in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Canadian Arctic

• Subject Area: Geology and Palaeontology
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 221211316

The Arctic realm experiences an amplified response to global climate forcing. The cascade of processes that connect cryosphere, ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic remain incompletely constrained by observations and theory. Hence, state-of-the-art climate models often fail to reproduce observational trends as well as past regional climate response patterns reconstructed from paleoclimatic archives. The international scientific team of ArcTrain with the PhD students in its center aims to advance the understanding of the variability of the Arctic ocean and cryosphere on time scales of decades to millennia and to use these results to assess the impact of projected future climate changes on the Arctic. The research profile of ArcTrain is given by the focus on interactions between three key elements of the Arctic physical environment: sea ice, North Atlantic Ocean circulation, and Greenland ice sheet and Canadian Arctic ice caps. These interactions are most clearly realized in the region where meltwater reaches sites of deep-water formation and where ocean circulation may influence the melting of land ice. This region, centered on the Baffin Bay, Labrador Sea and Greenland Sea with surrounding glaciated areas, forms the regional focus of ArcTrain. A combination of marine geology, geochemistry, physical oceanography, remote sensing and Earth-system modeling allows ArcTrain researchers to unravel and connect past, present and future climate changes in the region, provide new insights into processes underlying the rapidly changing Arctic environment and assess the impacts of Arctic warming on regional and global climate, ocean biogeochemistry and the marine sedimentary environment. ArcTrain provides a comprehensive qualification program for its PhD students, including team supervision, research residences, field courses, and structured training in expert skills and transferrable skills. The program is geared to enhance the career prospects and employability of its graduates at the international job market across academic and applied sectors. The combined research and training concept of ArcTrain has been implemented successfully for the first cohort of PhD students and it will be developed further in the second phase of ArcTrain. Its hallmarks will remain to be an interdisciplinary training with extensive field experience at sea and on land, tightly connected with research contributing to our understanding of global change in the Arctic realm.

• DFG Programme: International Research Training Groups
• International Connection: Canada
• Applicant Institution: Universität Bremen
• IRTG-Partner Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Michal Kucera, Ph.D.
• IRTG-Partner: Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Anne de Vernal
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Dierk Hebbeln; Professorin Dr. Simone A. Kasemann; Dr. Dagmar Kieke; Martin Losch, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Ben Marzeion; Dr. André Paul; Dr. Matthias Prange; Professorin Dr. Monika Rhein; Professor Dr. Michael Schulz; Dr. Gunnar Spreen; Professor Dr. Rüdiger Stein; Dr. Maren Walter