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Quaternary Environment of the Eurasian North, abbreviated QUEEN was an international and interdisciplinary research programme in the Arctic. QUEEN was established to understand the processes involved in environmental changes in the Arctic region by studying past environmental changes during the Late Cenozoic era. A primary objective of QUEEN was to make the environmental record and the history of glaciation during the last 250,000 years as complete for Eurasia as elsewhere. Regions of particular importance for understanding the Arctic's role in global climate change are the Eurasian shelves and the land masses south of these, including Siberian permafrost. The ice sheets in these regions are key elements in paleoclimatic models and play a vital role in the reconstruction of a continuous paleoenvironmental record. Special effort was devoted to the correlation of records from different sources across the Arctic. The programme was running between 1996 and 2003 under the umbrella of the European Science Foundation (ESF) and was coordinated by Prof. Dr. Jörn Thiede. == Background == Global climate models have shown that the Arctic Ocean and surrounding continental areas are highly sensitive to the Greenhouse Effect. The temperature increase predicted by such climate models would lead to a reduction in Arctic sea ice cover and the release of further Greenhouse gases from Arctic soils. This in turn would have a major impact on the European climate. Associated changes in surface albedo and ocean-atmosphere heat and gas exchange accelerate global warming, having a positive feedback effect. Increased temperatures of Arctic surface waters affects the deep water renewal in the Nordic Seas and the effectiveness of the global conveyor belt, which regulates the European climate through the Nordic heat pump. Partial melting of the Greenland ice sheet from warming in the Arctic induces a global sea level rise, increasing the danger of flooding in low lying regions close to coasts all over the world. The models predicting future climate change are tested and validated mainly against historical climate data when the actual changes that subsequently occurred are known. To do this accurately obviously requires detailed knowledge of what these past changes were. Although the Arctic is known to have a key role in climate change, comparatively little is known about extent and rates of Late Quaternary changes of climatically and oceanographically important parameters in the Arctic. Prior to QUEEN many projects were conducted in isolation, with little exchange of information between the institutions involved. Political changes in the late 198th/early 199th made it possible to exchange information freely between Russian scientists and their colleagues from Western countries. All scientists had access to the Russian Arctic, which comprises about half of the circum-Arctic land mass. As a result, many projects looking at climatic and environmental changes during the recent geological past were focusing on the Arctic as a whole. Among those, QUEEN was one of the first. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Quaternary Environment of the Eurasian North」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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