CASE Open Conference 4.2.-6.2. in Bordeaux

From February 4th to 6th I attended the Open Conference ‘The Changing Arctic and Subarctic Environment – Case’ in Bordeaux, France. In advance I applied for funding from ArcTrain for expenses for flights, the accommodation in a hotel in Bordeaux and the conference fee. All o f those were paid out o f the ArcTrain travel fund. The conference was the final meeting of the EU funded CASE project including 12 PhD projects which all focussed on the Arctic and Sub‐Arctic region. For this final meeting an open conference with four sessions and five invited keynote speakers was held at the Agora‐Haut‐Carré conference centre at Bordeaux University. This conference was an ideal opportunity for me to get a broad overview of the topics in the Arctic regions and of the different proxies that are used to reconstruct environmental changes and the difficulties that arise when comparing different proxy results. The four sessions of this conference dealt with the following topics
1. Developing paleoceanographically proxies ; quantitative reconstructions.
2. Interglaci a l paleoceanography from the northern North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean.
3. Ocean-continent linkages during interglacial periods.
4. The past 2000 years.
Especially the talks and posters of three PhD students working with the same proxy (IP25) I wil l use to reconstruct sea‐ ice cover gave me a much better understanding of its applicability , first problems I found and the need to get a better understanding of the background of this relatively new proxy. As one of the participant s of this conference was my Canadian supervisor, Anne deVernal from GEOTOP Montreal, I had the chance to meet her fo the first time and talk about my project and our future work together. During the breaks and the Gala Dinner I could talk to many different scientists who all work in the Arctic and provided me with a lot of information about this working area but also about the way to ‘manage’ a PhD thesis. This conference made it obvious to me that it is necessary to compare the own results to other records and other proxies. The combination of many different PhD projects in one region seems to be an ideal way to do that, single projects can benefit from each other as well as a broad data set can be produced to get a better understanding the whole system.

Henriette Kolling