The team of the Centre for Polar Studies and the Institute of Earth Sciences of the University of Silesia (Dariusz Ignatiuk, PhD – Head; Mariusz Grabiec, PhD, DSc, Assoc. Prof.; Michał Laska, PhD; Elżbieta Łepkowska, PhD; Marta Kondracka, PhD) is part of the consortium that received funding for the implementation of the LIQUIDICE project under the Horizon Europe programme. The leader of the project is the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Bartłomiej Luks, PhD), a partner of the Centre for Polar Studies. The project will be implemented in the years 2024–2028. The total budget of the initiative is EUR 7.5 million.
The LIQUIDICE project brings together experienced observers and cryospheric modelers to:
- comprehensively reassess past and next centuries of high-impact climate-induced changes – in regards to the Greenland Ice Sheet and climate-sensitive areas in the Alps, Norway, High-Mountain Asia (HMA) and Svalbard, including permafrost areas and their ecosystems;
- develop new, extended and harmonised data from Earth Observation (EO) satellites and ground stations;
- improve and test the hierarchy of ice sheet and glacial models using Earth Systems Models (ESM);
- inform on water resources, hydropower and socio-economic strategies.
The project envisages multidisciplinary cooperation between 18 research institutions from eight European countries (Poland, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain) and India.
South Spitsbergen | Photo by: archive of the Centre for Polar Studies