INFLOW : INFLOW - Holocene saline water inflow changes into the Baltic Sea, ecosystem responses and future scenarios

Funding Programme: Baltic Organisations Network for Funding Science (BONUS)

This project studies ongoing and past changes in both surface and deep water conditions and their timing by means of multi-proxy studies. Sediment proxy data along a transect from the marine Skagerrak to the freshwater dominated northern Baltic Sea is used.

The main aims are:

1. Quantification of the relationships between available long term instrumental data and signatures of recent sediments
2. Extension of these studies to longer time scales (past 6000 years)
3. Link these Baltic Sea records to climatic data from the wider North Atlantic realm in order to identify the forcing mechanisms of environmental changes
4. Produce model simulations for selected time slices back to 6000 years. Proxy reconstructions are compared to results from model simulations. The evaluated models are used to provide selected scenarios of impact of naturally and human induced climate change on the Baltic Sea ecosystem at the end of the 21st century.