i2B - Into The Blue: ERC Synergy Grant (2024-2030)
These are the big questions at the heart of i2B – Into the Blue, a six-year project funded by a €12.5 million Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Led by Dr Jochen Knies (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway), Professor Gerrit Lohmann (AWI – The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research), and Associate Professor Stijn De Schepper (NORCE/UiB – University of Bergen), i2B unites world-leading Arctic climate experts that will work together to investigate past Arctic ‘warmer-than-present-day’ climates and the impact on ecosystems and society, using cutting-edge research, geological records, and numerical models.
The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else on Earth, yet we still lack a full picture of how these changes will ripple across the globe. To close this knowledge gap, the i2B team is turning to the past—specifically, past "greenhouse" periods when the Arctic was ice-free and oceans turned blue. These ancient climate archives offer crucial clues about how ecosystems, sea ice, and global systems responded to warming.
Through expeditions into the Arctic, the project will collect new geological and biological data from sediments that hold the story of previous warm periods. By integrating these records with next-generation climate models, the team aims to reconstruct how ice and ecosystems evolved—and to predict how similar processes may unfold in the future.
The project is a collaboration between UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Norwegian Research Centre (NORCE), and the University of Bergen (UiB). This powerful partnership allows i2B to go beyond the state of the art, uniting past and future in a single scientific framework.