About GreenFjord

Accelerated climate change impacts southern Greenland fjord ecosystems and livelihoods profoundly as a result of atmospheric warming, changing vegetation and precipitation patterns, as well as enhanced glacier melt. Increased meltwater fluxes also affect marine ecosystem functioning and nutrient circulation, which in turn affect the marine food-web with cascading effects on biodiversity.
Fjords are particularly vulnerable because they lie at the nexus between the cryosphere, ocean, land, atmosphere and biosphere.
Within GreenFjord, we will explore the socio-cultural and environmental interactions by focusing our research on six domains and their linkages in two different fjord systems, with an ocean-terminating and a land-terminating glacier.

• The cryosphere cluster will investigate processes of glacier calving and iceberg export, as well as the resulting hydro-dynamics and nutrient fluxes in the fjord.
• The land cluster will provide constraints on the delivery of nutrients and organic carbon to the fjord ecosystem through rivers and streams.
• The ocean cluster focuses on understanding the consequences of glacial retreat and climate change on glacial sedimentation, nutrient dynamics and biological productivity.
• The atmosphere cluster investigates feedback mechanisms of climate change driven fjord emissions on atmospheric composition and cloud formation with links to precipitation and surface radiation.
• The biodiversity cluster pursues the aim of measuring the relationships between community dynamics and environmental change in nutrients to determine how biodiversity is affected by the rapid changes in fjord ecosystems using environmental DNA.
• The human cluster will work with Greenlanders to understand ways of dwelling with fjords, effects of environmental changes on livelihoods and perceptions of change by using art based methods.

For any questions regarding the GreenFjord research project, please contact the principal investigator Prof Julia Schmale (julia.schmale@epfl.ch) and the GreenFjord programme manager Dr Joanna Dyson (joanna.dyson@epfl.ch).