Arctic Change Conference
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Arctic Change Conference

I attended a very interesting and well organised conference in Copenhagen last week: ‘The Changing Arctic Conference’ (link here) with focus on security, environment, and society. Back in the old days when I worked at the Danish Polar Center, we used to have an annual event of a Polar Science meeting. This later turned into the ‘Hindsgavl’ polar science meetings. The conference I attended last week was the first of its kind with this new setup and with focus on all three partner countries in the realm of Denmark (Denmark, Faroe Islands, and Greenland). It worked out really well in my opinion and it was interesting to attend the different sessions of security and environment (never made it to the society session). As could be expected there was a lot of worrying new data on e.g., diminishing sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean and military safety issues in the Arctic region. Further, the lack of data from the Russian field stations hampers the climate change modelling. Thanks to the University of Copenhagen for organising this excellent conference in the spectacular ‘Sorte Diamant’ library building! For once, there were so many new faces and people unknown to me, which just shows that a new generation of polar researchers are entering the field – and it gave of course an excellent opportunity to talk to new people 🙂

Photo: Gabrielle. The Nature paper by Rantanen et al. (2022): ‘The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979’ is extensively cited and rightly so as they were the ones to throughly document the extensive warming of the Arctic region.
Photo: Gabrielle. And the impacts of Arctic warming presented by Adrian Lema, DMI
Photo: Gabrielle. Those were the days when polar researchers were dressed like this!
Photo: Gabrielle. Several new islands and nunataks emerging from the melting glaciers.
Photo: Gabrielle. Anders Svensson from the Niels Bohr Institute talked about the plans to return to the summit GRIP borehole once the EastGRIP project is done, to drill all the way down to the bedrock.
Photo: Gabrielle. Nice design!
Photo: Gabrielle. Nice name badges, too!
Photo: Gabrielle. I met up with my friend and former colleague, Katrine Biering Sonnenschein after the conference, now living and working in Trondheim, Norway. Almost 20 years ago, we both worked at the Danish Universities’ secretariat (Rektorkollegiets sekretariat) in Copenhagen.