IMCONet

IMCONet is an international Research Network that follows an interdisciplinary approach to understand the consequences of Climate Change in coastal Western Antarctica.

A Network for Staff Exchange and Training, IMCONet is funded by the Marie Curie Action IRSES (International Research Staff Exchange Scheme) of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union, and involves a 13-nation team. The activity brings European, South American and US scientists together to advance climate and ecosystem change research of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, a region of recent rapid aerial warming.

IMCONet benefits from 20 years of ecosystem investigations in the model area Potter Cove, a fjord-like inlet on the south coast of King George Island (South Shetland Archipelago). Coordinated interdisciplinary investigations of the changes in Potter Cove involving glaciologists, geologists, biogeochemists and biologists have been carried out from 2006-2013. It is hoped that a detailed understanding of long-term recorded processes will lead to a high resolution local environmental model that can be nested into global climate models to analyse changes on a time axis that enables predictions of future scenarios.

Steve Roberts and Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand are involved in the Sediment Archives and Glacial Geomorphology work package (WP5) of IMCONet. This work package deals with sediment archives from King George Island (KGI) on the sea floor, on land and in lakes. Signals of past environmental changes stored in these archives will be combined with investigation of glacial geomorphology on KGI. Analysis of three different marine core repositories (at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, BAS and the US) from the KGI area will be combined for the first time.

The overall aims of IMCONet are to:

• develop predictive climate change and ecosystem models for the whole Western Antarctic Peninsula coastal environment based on existing data sets and data exchange policies

• transfer knowledge between partner countries to enhance collaboration with high quality long-term measuring programs that aim to fill present measurement gaps

More specifically, work package 5 aims to reconstruct the KGI icecap variations during the last millennia of the Holocene from the sediment archives.

One major goal of IMCONet is the compilation, integration and dissemination of existing data, including yet unpublished resources.

Therefore, IMCONet is compiling this information with the PANGAEA-Publishing Network for Geological and Environmental Data. Our data, including related meta-information, are sustainably archived and accessible at WDC-MARE, using a persistent identification as provided through the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) system. The data exchange between project partners and the availability of products and published data to the scientific community will be established through PANGAEA’s existing client/server system and web services on the Internet. Any data and maps from IMCONet will be freely available in Open Access through the various PANGAEA web clients and services (search engines, portals, library catalogs).

Already compiled IMCOAST data and meta-data are available here.