The Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) System Study is a major international effort under Canadian leadership that aims at understanding how changes in the physical system affect biological processes, towards a better understanding of the potential effects of climate change. The CFL project is part of the PAN-AME cluster.

The project HERMES is designed to gain new insights into the biodiversity, structure, function and dynamics of ecosystems along Europe's deep-ocean margin to underpin the future development of a comprehensive European Ocean and Seas Integrated Governance Policy. It represents the first major attempt to understand European deep-water ecosystems and their environment in an integrated way (geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere of a pan-European range). HERMES aims to compare and contrast selected environments around the European margin from high northern latitudes (focus of this IPY proposal) to the Black Sea.

This project is designed to bring together a wide range of scholars, students, institutions, and approaches to study the key-concepts of movement, communication and strategies among arctic peoples.

Northern High Latitude Climate variability during the past 2000 years:implications for human settlement. "NORCLIM investigates how natural climate change over the past two millenia has affected human presence in the Arctic. Examples are the timing of Viking settlement on the Faroer, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland and the shift in whaling activities from Spitsbergen to Davis Strait during the Little Ice Age. To achieve the NORCLIM goals, geologists, climatologists and archeologists from seven counties will carry out marine and terrestrial fieldwork on key locations along a Newfoundland-Spitsbergen transect.

The Impacts of Oil and Gas Activity on Peoples in the Arctic Using a Multiple Securities Perspective From 2007-2010 a broad-based group of students and researchers from diverse backgrounds (political science to ecology) will take a human security approach to studying how oil and gas development will affect Arctic communities in Norway, Russia and Canada. By making human security central, we expect to connect Arctic peoples, researchers and policy makers in ways that will result in genuine listening and interaction among the groups.

Matthieu, the subject of today’s log, is our resident scientist. Working for the oceanographic laboratory at Paris-Jussieu University, he is responsible for managing all of the scientific activities on board. Qualified as an engineer in computing and electronics, Matthieu has already spent one year in the polar regions, passing a winter at the French Antarctic base Dumont d’Urville. His tour in the south was as a science technician, responsible for the base computer network administration and the maintenance of various scientific experiments. When asked what led him to the polar regions Matthieu explains it was for a number of reasons. “Mainly for the scientific interest, but also the fact that the French Polar Institute was next to my engineering school when I was a s...

ArcticWOLVES is an international initiative developed for the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008. The project will build a network of circumpolar wildlife observatories in order to assess the current state of arctic terrestrial food webs over a large geographical range. The network will provide baseline information to evaluate current and future population trends for a large number of species at several locations using standard protocols. Another aim of the project is to determine the relative importance of bottom-up (resources) and top-down (predators) forces in structuring arctic food webs, and how climate affects these trophic linkages.