Foram Overview
Our ongoing effort is to construct and interpret a modern benthic foraminiferal and environmental database for the Arctic seas. On this page we post SEM images of common Arctic foram species, mostly from the Barents and Kara seas. We'll keep uploading new images and plan to expand on distribution charts and data tables.
Objectives and Prospect
This page is devoted to Arctic foraminifers and aims to
- Present to students interested in paleontology or protozoology the look of the critters and general and specific issues connected;
- Reveal to specialists dealing with Arctic forams what we exactly mean naming a common species;
- Share our understanding of ecological requirements of these forams and their application to reconstructing the past marine environments;
- Set forth an informal discussion on the taxonomy and ecology of key taxa that would eventually end up with a unified clarification, published or unpublished.
Our Group
Our working group is informally centered at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University and includes specialists in foram biology and Quaternary Arctic stratigraphy and paleoceanography:
Leonid Polyak
Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center
The Ohio State University
E-mail: polyak.1@osu.edu
Lawrence Febo
Graduate Student
Department of Geology
The Ohio State University
E-mail: febo.6@osu.edu
David Lubinski
Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
University of Colorado at Boulder
E-mail: David.Lubinski@colorado.edu
Sergei Korsun
Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russia
E-mail: s_korsun@geo.sio.rssi.ru
Support and Funding
We acknowledge the support of U.S. National Science Foundation award OPP-9725418 to Polyak and a U.S. National Research Council Grant (Office of International Affairs, Collaboration in Basic Science and Engineering) to Lubinski for support for Korsun's visit to the US in 2000-2001.