INFLOW

 

Holocene saline water inflow changes into the Baltic Sea, ecosystem responses and future scenarios

INFLOW final report

INFLOW briefing on key results

Year 2 progress report
Year 1 progress report
For more relevant publications, visit www.bonusportal.org/publications (category BONUS+ reports).

Begin date 1.1.2009

End date 31.12.2011

Grant: 1 582 280€

Environmental conditions of the Baltic Sea’s (BS) ecosystem strongly depend on meteorological forcing over the area and adjacent NE Atlantic. It affects e.g. regional hydrography and saline water inflow from the North Sea into the BS. These changes are recorded in the BS sediments. We aim to identify forcing mechanisms of environmental changes of the BS, to differentiate natural variability and changing patterns due to man-made activity, by studying these sediment archives. In addition we will provide scenarios of the future development of the BS.

We will study ongoing and past changes in both surface and deep water conditions and their timing by means of multi-proxy studies. We use sediment proxy data along transect from the marine Skagerrak to the freshwater dominated northern BS. We have identified following aims: (i) Quantification of the relationships between available long term instrumental data and signatures of recent sediments; (ii) Extension of these studies to longer time scales (past 6000 years); (iii) Link these BS records to climatic data from the wider North Atlantic realm in order to identify the forcing mechanisms of environmental changes; (iv) Produce model simulations for selected time slices back to 6000 years. Proxy reconstructions will be compared to results from model simulations. We will use these evaluated models to provide selected scenarios of impact of naturally and human induced climate change on the BS ecosystem at the end of the 21st century.

 

Keywords

Sediment multi-proxy study, ecosystem modelling, climate change scenarios, saline water inflow, redox conditions

List of Participants and Principal Scientists

Geological Survey of Finland, Finland		Aarno Kotilainen (Coordinator)
Leibniz-Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Germany		Thomas Neumann
Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Denmark		Antoon Kuijpers
Lund University, Sweden		Ian Snowball
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Sweden		Markus Meier
University of Szczecin, Poland		Andrzej Witkowski
Unifob AS, Norway		Eystein Jansen
University of Helsinki, Finland		Juha Karhu
A. P. Karpinsky Russian Geological Research Institute (VSEGEI), Russia		Mikhail Spiridonov

 

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