Main projects at present are:
Kinnvika - you can read a blog from our spring 2007 expedition
Antarctic blue ice area paleoclimate - you can read a blog from our 2006/7 expedition
Clim-Atic - you can read about our project to make scenarios for the future in Lapland especially from the tourism angle here
I am also involved in the EU project to provide improved constraints on models of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), its website is here
Aslak grinsted completed his PhD thesis
just before travelling to Antarctica in November 2006
on advanced methods of time series modelling
Anna Sinisalo defended her thesis on November 16 2007
on geophysical exploration of Antarctic blue ice areas
The main question my group and I try to address are:
How are glaciers in Svalbard and Antarctica behaving now
What do ice cores from Svalbard and Antarctic tell us about climate history
What will changing climate do to glaciers in the polar regions
The tools we use to answer these questions are
Ice core chemical analysis to extract past climate information
Ground penetrating radar studies of glaciers to study their internal structure
Mathematical modelling and analysis of the climate records and glacier evolution
Projects described by area
More detailed descriptions of each individually funded project can be found here
Field work in Svalbard
Questions to be addressed in our Svalbard reearch are:What is the climate history preserved in ice core records
What is the detailed structure of Svalbard glaciers
How have the glaciers changed over the last century
Recent photos from the 2001 campagn on Lomonosovfonna are available. This was primarily a radar and pit sampling shor trip, and our summer student Kristiina Virkkunen took part in, and will do detailed chemsitry of the winter snow on the summit as her "project" work for her Master's degree.
Two of my PhD students are primarily working on Svalbard glaciology: Anja Pälli is studying the radar properties of polythermal glaciers, particularly the hydrothermal internal structure; Teija Kekonen is a chemist working on the Lomonosovfonna ice core from Svalbard.
The Polish Polar Station in Hornsund, southern Svalbard (this is the external link to the Polish site), where Anja Pälli and I were doing ground penetrating radar studies of Hansbreen with the Malå Geoscience Ramac radar 50 MHz antennas and with higher resolution 200 MHz antennas. We also profiled numerous other smaller glaciers in the region such as Tuvbreen. The radar was very good in general, though of course there were repairs that need doing as well - with always excellent help from the Poles, especially Piotr Glowacki, and always with time for a nice beer with our gallant leader.
In 1999 Anja and I together with Jacek Jania (University of Silesia)
and Piotr Glowacki (Polish Academy of Sciences) began a program to study
changes in glaciers over a 100 year period in Svalbard. The fieldwork
was interesting, and some pictures by the Poles are
here.
Antarctica
Questions to be addressed in our Antarctic reearch are:Can we extract climate data from surface blue ice
How does the climate information compare with that from deep ice cores
I went with a group (Jari Vehviläinen and Anna Sinisalo - see my research group for details of the projects) to Antarctica this coming season with FINNARP working on paleoclimate data from blue ice fields. A brief article, and some photos of the trip: