COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Aiming to complete a modern benthic foraminiferal and environmental database for the Barents and Kara Seas for a better understanding of the environmental controls on the most common species, David Lubinski invited Sergei Korsun of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow to the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at University of Colorado from October 2000 to April 2001. The scientists hoped that such a database would promote the development of new quantitative methods for reconstructing past marine environmental change and improve our understanding of a number of past climate events.

Having begun the project, it became clear that more data were available than anticipated, allowing Korsun to concentrate his efforts on modern benthic and environmental data from the Kara Sea. His efforts were instrumental in the successful assembly, mapping, and interpretation of this data. Using the momentum generated by this study, Korsun constructed a preliminary web site to promote the use of benthic foraminifera in the Arctic for paleoclimate studies. Additionally, Korsun participated in an international working group meeting to plan how climate transfer functions can best be developed from this poorly used proxy.

In addition to the completion of the database and a paper using this database, Lubinsky, Korsun, and other collaborating scientists plan to extend their initial work by further, more detailed multivariate statistical analysis of the Kara dataset and by expanding the database into the Barents Sea, which will result in several more scientific papers. The group anticipates much fruitful collaboration in the near future and has initiated this process through the submission of a proposal to the National Science Foundation.