Northern Seas

Northern Seas: An Interdisciplinary Study of Human/Marine and Climate System Interactions
in Arctic North America over the Last Millennium

 

Project Description

The Northern Seas project assembles past climatic and ecological information from historic documents to produce a high resolution understanding of the Arctic System over time. Documents including the journals of coastal arctic traders, exploratory expedition members, ship’s logs and commercial whaling and sealing records that span the past 400 years provide daily weather and marine ecosystem conditions at the local scale. Historical records offer rich data sets on, for example, air temperature, sea surface temperature, wind velocity, sea ice conditions, and species biogeography. This data can be placed into the context of global-scale climate events such as the Little Ice Age (~1300 to 1850) and local and regional-scale human activities, thus providing a more finely nuanced portrait of the Arctic System over time. In combination with existing paleo-environmental, climatic and sea ice information, evidence from historic records advances developing frameworks for understanding system response to changing conditions in the future. 

Project Updates
THE PEARY EXPEDITION TO REACH THE NORTH POLE 1905-1906

                             ​

 

Personnel

Principal Investigator:

Maribeth Murray, Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary

Research Team:

Patricia Wells, Postdoctoral Fellow, Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary

Matthew Ayres, Postdoctoral Fellow, Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary
 

Collaborators and Partners:

Peter Schledermann, Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary

Shannon Vossepoel, Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary

David Barber, Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba

David Atkinson, Department of Geography, University of Victoria            

Kevin Wood, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Government

Clive Wilkinson, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia

Philip Brohan, Met Office, Hadley Center, UK

Funding for this project is provided by an Insight Grant (781285) from  SSHRC Logo