Global climate is rapidly warming, impacting Polar Regions, and causing ice sheets to melt and thin at unprecedented rates. Massive stores of carbon are held beneath these ice sheets, alongside vulnerable ecosystems and large carbon sinks associated with the aligned polar oceans. The impact of ice sheet retreat on Earth’s carbon cycle has high uncertainty and is not currently included in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments.
Bringing together world-leading experts, the new Centre of Excellence, Centre for ice, Cryosphere, Carbon and Climate (iC3) will fill a vital knowledge gap in polar science by quantifying impacts of ice sheet change on Earth’s carbon cycle and sensitive ocean ecosystems.
Text: Mariana Esteves
Following tough competition, the Research Council of Norway announced on the 23rd September that nine new Centres of Excellence (SFF) had received generous funding over a 10-year period to undertake ground-breaking research. We are proud that one of the successful centres was the Centre for ice, Cryosphere, Carbon and Climate (iC3), led by CAGE scientists, Professor Jemma Wadham and Associate Professor Monica Winsborrow (CAGE assistant director and WP2 team leader). The opportunity to apply for a new SFF is announced every five years and is highly sought-after with only a 5-10% success rate. CAGE was awarded this same status in 2013, making iC3 the second SFF hosted by the Department of Geosciences, UiT.
Focused on the role ice sheets play in the global carbon budget, iC3 builds in part on CAGE expertise. Ice sheets represent one of the most biologically-active carbon stores on Earth, overlying ancient soils, lake/marine sediments, and deep hydrocarbon reservoirs, and are directly linked to carbon cycling in downstream marine ecosystems via meltwater discharge and associated carbon and nutrients. Yet, there are order of magnitude uncertainties in carbon stores and fluxes, and currently ice sheets are rarely included in global carbon budgets. Reducing this uncertainty is vital to inform policy and management strategies in polar regions and globally.
Tackling this grand challenge requires expertise from many different scientific disciplines including glaciology, geology, microbiology, geochemistry and oceanography; and iC3 will unite world-leading experts from CAGE, UiT, Norwegian Polar Institute, NORCE and other institutions around the world.
iC3 will also benefit from world-leading Norwegian infrastructure such as research facilities and polar research vessels, that will enable investigation of carbon-cryosphere interactions across the entire ice-to-ocean domain, in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
Press release from UiT The Arctic University of Norway:
https://en.uit.no/news/article?p_document_id=790088
Announcements from the Norwegian Research Council, Forskningsrådet (in Norwegian):
