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Planning summer fieldwork

The scientists taking part in SciencePub are preparing for a four-year project under the umbrella of the Polar Year. They are now planning the first field season and look forward to getting started. 
The broadly composed research team aims to find answers to two key questions. What are the natural climatic and environmental changes in the Arctic, and how have human beings adapted to them?
The answers will reach the general public, partly through this web page:

 Thirst for knowledge

- To put it a bit flippantly, the SciencePub home page will be a meeting place for those thirsting for knowledge, says Eiliv Larsen, the project manager and a research geologist at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU).
- We want people to pop into SciencePub whenever they like, he continues. - We’ll be collecting all the information about the project here and will ensure that the site is continuously updated on the work being done, in both a scientific and a popularised form.
The first fieldwork in this far-reaching project starts already this spring when NGU scientists will travel to the Archangel and Komi regions of north-western Russia to study sections along rivers and the coast revealing information from former ice-dammed lakes, glaciers and ice-free periods. 

Media students

This summer, there will be a cruise in the Barents Sea involving marine geologists from the University of Tromsø and the Norwegian Polar Institute.
At the same time, geologists from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences at Ås will study variations in climate and the environment in the Kongsfjord area near Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard. Students studying journalism at Oslo University College will probably also take part here.
In addition, University of Tromsø archaeologists will be seeking pioneer settlements in Finnmark.

 Human beings and the ice

- All told, we will be studying natural climatic archives recorded in sediments deposited on land and in water, in Svalbard, north Norway, north-western Russia and adjacent maritime areas. This will enable SciencePub to increase our knowledge of the processes taking place in interglacial periods (like the present situation) and ice ages (glacial periods), Eiliv Larsen explains.
- Based on this, we will reconstruct variations in past climates and changes in the physical environment over the past 130 000 years or so. The results will be used to gain new insight into how people immigrated and adopted new adaptation strategies at the end of the last Ice Age, he tells us.