The Polar Regions are a key topic of growing interest in the science community at the moment. The international IODP (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program) has also focused its interest to the dynamics of the Polar Regions and their global climate impacts. The earlier reports by the Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel (IPCC) have not paid much attention to past climates as a guide to the future. Therefore it is crucial that new geological advances, along with those in glaciology, will be represented in the next IPCC assessment report which is due to be published in 2013. Paleosedimentological and climatic reconstruction methods have matured greatly in the past decades offering the possibility to test climate models. One of the most important operations for gathering paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental data is the IODP programme, which has been in underway since 2004. Finland is a full member in this programme through the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling supported by the Academy of Finland. The IODP Expedition 302 (ACEX) retrieved the first drill cores from the central Arctic Ocean seafloor in 2004 and revealed the climatic evolution of the Arctic during the last 56 Myr. The ACEX sediment samples are also studied in Finland for clay mineral distribution and quartz grain surface microtextures and their glacial imprints. One specific future focus is the IODP Expedition 318 to drill on Wilkes Land glacial margin, Antarctica in January and February 2010. It is of great interest to paleoclimatologists as the largely ice-free landscape, on which the first continental ice sheet formed, can now be studied for the first time. Samples for the University of Oulu based studies will be collected from the shelf progradational wedge foreset for studying Eocene and older sediments, and also from outer shelf site for studying Miocene climate evolution. As a new initiative, a full proposal for IODP was submitted for scientific drilling in the Baltic Sea with the title "Paleoenvironmental evolution of the Baltic Sea through the Last Glacial Cycle". This should now be fully promoted. The Baltic Sea Basin is one of the world's largest intra-continental basins. It has served as a depositional sink throughout its geological history, and its accumulated sediments comprise a unique high-resolution paleoenvironmental archive. It provides a unique opportunity to reconstruct climatic variability of global importance, controlled by e.g. changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Arctic Oscillation (AO). The new initiative for the European Aurora Borealis multi-purpose icebreaker with drilling capabilities will, when in operation, certainly facilitate the most modern paleoclimatic research in polar setting in the near future. The Aurora Borealis project is presently included in the list of the European Scientific Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).

West: 135.4500 East: 144.0000 North: 87.5600 South: -66.3000

Expedition: 302

Expedition: 318

Accessed on Feb. 5, 2013

Provider: SEDIS Publication Catalogue

Data set link: http://sedis.iodp.org/pub-catalogue/index.php?id=2013-016947 (c.f. for more detailed metadata)

Data download: application/pdf

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