SEOS faculty to explore Arctic and Labrador Sea as part of $35 million NSERC initiative

SEOS professors Jay Cullen, Roberta Hamme, Jody Klymak, and Diana Varela were part of two teams that were each awarded approx $5 million each to study climate change in the Arctic and Labrador Sea as part of NSERC's Climate Change and Atmospheric Research program. All four are oceanographers, and were part of the "Canadian Arctic GEOTRACES" team, led by Roger Francois at UBC.  GEOTRACES is part of an international program to track trace metals through the world's oceans, and this project will support Canada's Arctic contribution to this effort.  As trace metals are important to a large variety of biogechemical processes, the project will work closely with biological and physical oceanographers to track how water flows through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and how biological productivity is linked to Arctic climate and change.

The second team had Profs. Hamme and Klymak on it, and is called Ventilation, Interactions and Transports Across the Labrador Sea (VITALS), led by Paul Myers at University of Alberta.  Their goal is to better understand the air-sea interactions in the Labrador Sea and the pathways to ventillation driven by the physics and biology there.  The Labrador Sea is one of the few regions in the world where "deep water" is produced by strong winter cooling, and therefore it plays an important role in the exchange of heat and gasses in the ocean. 

Both projects have substantial field work attached to them, and student opportunities.