Wieter Boone

Vlaams Instituut Voor De Zee | VLIZ · Marine Robotics Centre

The freshwater content of the Arctic Ocean and its bordering seas has recently increased. Observing freshening events is an important step towards identifying the drivers and understanding the effects of freshening on ocean circulation and marine ecosystems. Here, we present a 13-year (2003-2015) record of temperature and salinity in Young Sound-Ty...

Rising temperatures in the Arctic cause accelerated mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and reduced sea ice cover. Tidewater outlet glaciers represent direct connections between glaciers and the ocean where melt rates at the ice-ocean interface are influenced by ocean temperature and circulation. However, few measurements exist near outlet glaci...

In high-latitude fjord ecosystems, the spring bloom accounts for a major part of the annual primary production and thus provides a crucial energy supply to the marine food web. However, the environmental factors that control the timing and intensity of these spring blooms remain uncertain. In 2013, we studied the spring bloom dynamics in Godthåbsfj...

The accelerated melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been linked to a sudden increase in the presence of warm subsurface coastal water in west Greenland. Yet pathways of warm coastal water along the entire west Greenland coast have remained largely unstudied. Here we present the first, near‐synoptic hydrographic observations at both the continental...

In pristine sea ice-covered Arctic waters the potential of natural attenuation of oil spills has yet to be uncovered, but increasing shipping and oil exploitation may bring along unprecedented risks of oil spills. We deployed adsorbents coated with thin oil films for up to 2.5 month in ice-covered seawater and sea ice in Godthaab Fjord, SW Greenlan...

Oceanographic and ice-mass-balance records are presented from two moorings deployed on landfast multiyear ice in the Wandel Sea (North Greenland) during June-August 2015. Here we show that the melting and drainage of >1 m of snow from June 14 to July 14 created a double-diffusive vertical stratification which resulted in supercooling of water and e...

Dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) is an important parameter to characterize the biogeochemical processes in sea ice and across the ocean-sea ice-atmosphere interface. The main challenge in bulk sea ice processing for DIC analysis is to melt the ice core without exposure to the air, which otherwise might contaminate the sample. A common practice is t...

Icebergs and bergy makes up a significant component of the total freshwater flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet to the ocean. Observations of iceberg trajectories are biased towards larger icebergs and, as a result, the drift characteristics of smaller icebergs and bergy bits are poorly understood. In an attempt to fill this critical knowledge gap, w...

Expendable Ice Trackers (EXITE; Carlson et al., 2017) were deployed on 9 bergy bits in Godthåbsfjord in August 2016. EXITE construction and the deployment of 7 trackers near Kangiata Nunata Sermia (KNS) are described in Carlson et al. (2017). These trajectories correspond to ICETRAJ_01.kml ICETRAJ_02.kml ICETRAJ_03.kml ICETRAJ_06.kml ICETRAJ_07.km...

Six and a half month records from three ice-tethered Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers deployed in October 2013 in Young Sound fjord in Northeast Greenland are used to analyze the acoustic backscatter signal. The acoustic data suggest a systematic diel vertical migration (DVM) of scatters below the land-fast ice during polar night. The scatters we...

An oceanographic field campaign was carried out from 30 April to 8 June 2014 to assess the influence of ice-related processes for the hydrography of Young Sound. Several along-fjord transects were executed to determine the vertical struc- ture of temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen. These data, supplemented with measurements from three ice-t...