QUEEN – A 7-YEAR PROGRAMME OF THE EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION (ESF)

QUEEN (Quaternary Environment of the Eurasian North) aims at deciphering the Late Quaternary history of a part of our world which is of eminent importance for an understanding of mid- to long-term climatic variations over the last glacial-interglacial cycle. The ambiguities of reconstructions of the extent of the Eurasian ice sheets and the poor understanding of the palaeoenvironment of the Arctic Ocean, have attracted research groups to conduct field studies in northern Eurasia and marine expeditions to the adjacent shelf and the Arctic Ocean. Such a substantial number of studies were conducted in bilateral cooperations between scientific institutions in Russia and in western Europe that the ESF decided to bring them together under the QUEEN umbrella. The QUEEN Programme started in January 1996 and will be completed by the end of the year 2002. It has provided a pan-European focus for both terrestrial and marine investigations of the glacial and climate history of the entire Eurasian Arctic. The research activities have been stimulated by the annual workshops organised by QUEEN and publication of their results in international scientific journals.

An important step for QUEEN was the publication of a first volume of scientific papers (Late Quaternary History of Northwestern Russia and Adjacent Shelves, Boreas, 28 (1), 1-242). It included a comprehensive reconstruction of the extent of Weichselian ice sheets - especially of those at the Last Glacial maximum (LGM). The results of QUEEN field work demonstrated that the LGM ice sheet was substantially smaller than had previously been anticipated. More recently, QUEEN has presented its second volume of scientific papers to an international community (Eurasia and adjacent Arctic seas during the late Quaternary, Global and Planetary Change, 31 (1-4)). The themes of this latest volume address two major issues: (1) the Late Quaternary paleoenvironmental history of the Arctic Ocean and its shelf seas, and (2) the terrestrial and limnic stratigraphy and palaeonvironmental history of the Late Quaternary in northernmost Eurasia. Further information is available from the QUEEN website (http://www.geomar.de/~hbauch/king/html/queen.html).