Middlebury undergraduate Ashley Rodriguez and I are thrilled to be joining the SiTrAC cruise aboard the RV Celtic Explorer (photo at right) led by Chief Scientist Dr. Audrey Morley of the University of Galway. SiTrAC is an acronym for Signal Tracking to unveil Arctic Climate variability, which is exactly what we’ll be doing during our month out at sea (tentative ship track below). We’ll be part of a team of scientists that also includes Columbia University graduate student Apollonia Arellano.
Black line shows the tentative cruise track for SiTrAC. Symbols indicate pre-existing sediment core sites, some of which we may re-core on this cruise.
Watch this space for posts by Allison, Ashely, and Apollonia about:
Our preparations for the cruise
Life aboard a research ship
The instruments we’re deploying to trace Arctic change - past and present
How we reconstruct past change from marine sediments
The specific research questions members of the scientific party are interested in answering
The charismatic megafauna we spot
Photo of the RV Celtic Explorer from the Irish Marine Institute
The Nordic Seas are experiencing some of the fastest rates and largest magnitudes of climate change on the planet (SST anomaly plot below). We are interested in studying these changes and using past episodes of abrupt climate change, recorded in the marine sediments at the bottom of the ocean, to help understand what future change will look like. We are especially interested in these sites because they play an outsize role in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which drives global ocean circulation and climate (more on that later).
North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies from 2022 relative to the ‘97-90 reference interval. Figure made using U Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.