Description of the organisation
The University of Gothenburg (UGOT) was founded as Göteborgs högskola (Gothenburg University College) in 1891. In 1907, it was granted the same status as Uppsala University and Lund University by the Swedish government, thus creating Sweden’s third university. 38 000 students and 6 000 employees make the University a large and inspiring place to work and study, with a continuous flow of new knowledge and ideas. The broad-ranging research at the University of Gothenburg is innovative, characterised by multidisciplinary cooperation, closely linked to education and stands in close contact with society. Our 3000 researchers, teachers and doctoral students span from developmental biology and gender studies to logistics and marine mammals. The University of Gothenburg is environmentally certified and works actively for sustainable development. The Department of Marine Sciences (DMS) at the Faculty of Science brings together research foci within oceanography, geology, chemistry, biology and conservation. This research is carried out both within individual subjects and in larger multidisciplinary projects. The department has a number of nationally unique research fields, with the flagship being our ultra-modern infrastructure for marine research and education, with a brand new 45 meter research vessel, Skagerak, and two modern research stations, Kristineberg (est. 1877) and Tjärnö (est. 1963). This infrastructure gives us unique access to several marine environments, as well as technology, laboratories and instruments that permit research at the highest international class within the field of marine sciences.
Expertise particularly relevant for the project
With close to 40 years of modern polar research, the DMS has a long tradition and strong expertise in polar marine sciences. High-latitude fieldwork, novel analytical method development, and syntheses with emphasis on the marine carbonate system, anthropogenic carbon, and climate change are among the core research themes of the department. Previous research has greatly benefitted from support from several large national, international, and European research programs (see below). These projects have resulted in numerous research publications of high impact factor related to the study of rapidly changing Arctic Ocean and its adjacent marginal seas with a particular focus on ocean acidification and anthropogenic carbon. Since 1980, the marine chemistry research group at DMS has collected and analyzed hydrographic and biogeochemical observations from the deep central Arctic Ocean and the Siberian Shelf Seas within national and international research efforts. Recently, it has been shown that the anthropogenic carbon storage is rapidly changing in the central Arctic Ocean down to at least 1500 m, this, driven by pre-acidified inflowing waters of Atlantic origin (Ulfsbo et al., 2018). The increase in anthropogenic carbon, consecutively leads to ocean acidification which has been shown to increase in all major parts of the Arctic Ocean, from the highly dynamic Siberian Shelf Seas (Anderson et al., 2017a; Semiletov et al., 2016), to the Amerasian (Qi et al., 2017) and Eurasian Basins (Ulfsbo et al., 2018). It is unclear whether the Arctic Ocean, under summer ice- free conditions, will remain a large sink for atmospheric CO2, will become a moderate sink, or that it even will become a CO2 source. It is also unclear whether the Arctic biological pump is enhanced or reduced by the recent loss of sea ice. The outcome will depend on the future changes in primary and net community production (export production) and may vary by region. Our ability to predict the changing character of the Arctic Ocean thus requires a thorough understanding of the current state and processes governing primary and net community production (NCP), in addition to the increasing anthropogenic carbon and ocean acidification (Ulfsbo et al., 2014).
For more information visit UGOT website.