The Arctic Ocean forms one of the remote areas of investigation of the sedimentology group. Click here for a map of the working area.

Goals of this part of the investigations include

• To carry out bottom-current speed reconstructions and relate them to the climate development.
• To reconstruct Arctic paleoceanography and paleoclimatology since the last glacial maximum (LGM).

Here the sortable silt mean grain size serves as an indicator for current speed. To eliminate adverse effects of ice-rafted material a correction function was established. The resulting data set yields information on variations in bottom-current speed which can be related directly to climate change and to fluctuations in thermohaline overturn in the Nordic Seas. Unequivocal cold events such as the Younger Dryas were periods of lower bottom-current speed whereas warmer periods suggest increased bottom-current activity. Holocene climate phases such as the cold '8,200 year Event' and the warm 'Roman Climate Optimum' among a number of short-term climate events left clear traces in the record. Also, there is evidence for a weakening of the bottom currents during the time of the North Atlantic Heinrich Event 1. The Yermak Plateau current-speed record correlates well with sedimentologic records from the North Atlantic (Bond et al., 1997; Bianchi and McCave, 1999) that mirror thermohaline activity and climate change..