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Participation in UNIS Quaternary Environment course

Lay summary

Description of the programme

The Arctic Quaternary Environments course is a five week intensive course for MSc and PhD candidates at the University Centre of Svalbard (UNIS). This course aims to give insights into the development of the Arctic through the Quaternary Period with emphasis on interactions and feedbacks between climate, the cryosphere, and oceans and how they have evolved across glacial and interglacial cycles. Training combines state-of-arts lectures, literature studies, student seminars and a workshop focussed on discussions of the glacial histories of Arctic regions. Terrestrial, marine and ice core records and dating methods such as radiocarbon, luminescence, and cosmogenic dating were discussed.

How did you benefit from the programme?

This course has highly improved my understanding in Quaternary sciences. The content of the course was rich in knowledge and diverse. All participants and lecturers used different proxies or/and dating methods in their current research. Thus, it was interesting to exchange experiences and knowledge with everybody. Moreover, this course gave me concrete ideas for my master’s project, in which I combine luminescence dating with numerical modelling to understand the transport of debris through ice masses.

What were the highlights of the training?

Each Friday a group of 3-5 participants prepared a 3-hour seminar for the others classmates. The activities of the seminar were focused on the current week’s learning. All seminars were creative, and we learnt and remembered the large amount of knowledge/information given during the week through summarizing it through games and exercises. It helped us feel confident, and everybody felt included. These seminars opened interesting discussions between the participants and also with the professors.

Would you recommend the programme to other students?

I highly recommend this course to MSc and PhD who are interested by Quaternary sciences and Arctic environments. This course highlights multi-proxy techniques and dating methods that can be used for many applications and exposes you to some that you may be unaware of. It is an amazing opportunity to meet other researchers and collaborate from everywhere in the world. The weakness was the cancellation of the fieldwork due to budget cuts, just before the course.

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