| Summary: | The warming of the past decades has been more pronounced in the Arctic than elsewhere on the globe. Although the observational data indicates significant temporal and spatial variability in the Arctic, the few existing instrumental records are too short to determine the full potential range of Arctic climate variability that is crucial to achieve realistic future projections. Unravelling past environmental change in the Arctic beyond the instrumental period can therefore only be achieved by investigating a suite of proxy records. The rate of ice-sheet retreat across polar continental shelves, ice-stream collapses and their relationships to short-term sea-level changes during deglacial periods are a matter of debate. However, if the associated catchment area and ice reservoir of an ice-stream system are locally restricted, the deposits which typically form in such an environment record sensitively these ice advance and retreat dynamics as a result of climatic variability. The Svalbard archipelago is located in the Arctic within the northernmost reach of the West Spitsbergen Current (WSC), which is the major pathway both for heat and water volume transport to the Arctic Ocean. The WSC enters the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait, the only deepwater connection between Arctic and Atlantic oceans. This gateway plays a fundamental role in controlling the oceanographic and climatic conditions of the Atlantic sector of the Northern Hemisphere. With the CORIBAR project, we want to decipher rapid climatic changes in the north-Atlantic context by 1) reconstructing the ice-stream dynamics in the Kveithola region (NW Barents Sea); 2) understanding the sedimentation dynamics at the neighbouring continental slope in response to meltwater discharge and ice-stream history; 3) investigating the sedimentation dynamics and depocentre formations on the associated shallow continental shelf; and 4) reconstructing the sea-ice history with regard to changes in marine productivity and deep-water formation processes along the western ...
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