Lund University founded in 1666 is the largest unit for research and education in Sweden. BALTIC GAS is within the Department of Geology and is part of the GeoBiosphere Science Centre (CGB). The CGB is aCentre of Excellence as the Lund Centre for Studies of the Carbon Cycle and Climatic Interactions (LUCC) by the Swedish Research Council (VR) through the Linné Programme. We are concerned with understanding the Earth as a system: from geobiospheric processes at geological time-scales, over present day climate-ecosystem interactions, predictions of future changes in climate and Earth functioning.

Tasks

During the past 10,000 years of Holocene history, the Baltic Sea has been exposed to climate shifts that have affected the entire ecosystem and has left chemical signatures in the sedimentary record. We will analyze these signatures at key target sites in order to understand the effect of climatic forcing during a time when there was no human influence. We will study sediment stratigraphy and age structure, sediment type and origin, organic carbon content and source, microfossils, isotopic signatures of carbon and oxygen, etc. These and other signatures will reflect past salinity, temperature, precipitation, river run-off, productivity, plankton communities, and anoxia. In the basin-scale models of WP5 we will use these observed past changes in the Baltic Sea to refine the predictive models describing future scenarios of ecosystem development.