Cool summer

While most of the United States spent the summer in the grips of intense heat waves, University of Delaware doctoral student Aruggoda Kapuge Isuri Umejya Kapuge was about as far away from the heat as possible. Kapuge spent her summer conducting research off the western continental margin of Svalbard, Norway, in the Fram Strait, a body of water connecting the Arctic Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean to the south.

Kapuge, a doctoral student in the Department of Earth Sciences and a member of the Basak Lab for Ocean Geochemistry (BLOG), was competitively selected to sail on board the JOIDES Resolution (JR) research vessel as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program's (IODP) Expedition 403: Eastern Fram Strait Paleo-Archive.

In this expedition, the research team drilled the bottom of the ocean to recover continuous sections of marine sediments that hold millions of years of climate information.

The overarching goal is to reconstruct the extent of sea ice in the high northern latitudes and its influence on past ocean and climate changes, especially during key climate transitions through Earth's history.