DY081 ICY-LAB

The northern high-latitude regions are experiencing some of the fastest most rapid changes observed in recent decades: Arctic temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global mean, and the lowest sea-ice year on record was documented in 2012; and there are concerns about the impact of glacial melt in Greenland. The Labrador Sea is a critical component of the global ocean and climate system. This area of the North Atlantic receives freshwater inputs from the Arctic, Greenland and the Canadian Shield and is a formation locus of the deep water masses, which represent a major component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that drives large heat and nutrient fluxes in the global oceans. Furthermore, this region of the high latitude North Atlantic is an important ground for fisheries and other natural resources.

The ICY-LAB project will help us understand nutrient and isotope cycling in the climatically critical but understudied regions of the Labrador Sea and Greenland fjords, and the impact of cryosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere on the biogeochemistry of the region and the global oceans. In particular, it will investigate the cycling of silicon, an essential nutrient for many organisms that make their skeletons from biogenic silica, including diatoms (a group of algae responsible for a major proportion of organic carbon export in the oceans) and deep-sea sponges.