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 