data in CASCADE
Observed locations included in CASCADE

The Circum-Arctic Sediment Carbon Database (CASCADE) is an international collaboration that collects and curates published and unpublished data in sediments from the entire Arctic Ocean on organic carbon (OC)  and total N (TN) content, OC isotopes (δ13C, Δ14C) and concentrations of biomarkers focusing on terrestrial sources and their degradation status  (e.g., long-chain n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and lignin phenols). It is the vision for CASCADE to be expanded by other components, such as Hg, organic contaminants, more biomarkers, sediment physical properties and for the full range of sediment cores.

The CASCADE is openly and freely available online at the Bolin Centre Database and provided in various data formats. A companion paper was published in Earth System Science Data by Martens et al. (2021). Given the increasing number of studies in the Arctic, an organization for continued curation and frequent updates are key to the continuation and relevance of CASCADE.

The below listed project members curate CASCADE together and the group can be reached with contributions using the email address cascade|at|aces.su.se. After first contact we start a dialog to gather required meta data along with license information to integrate contributions.

Contact information

Visiting addresses:

Geovetenskapens Hus,
Svante Arrhenius väg 8, Stockholm

Arrheniuslaboratoriet, Svante Arrhenius väg 16, Stockholm (Unit for Toxicological Chemistry)

Mailing address:
Department of Environmental Science
Stockholm University
106 91 Stockholm

Press enquiries should be directed to:

Stella Papadopoulou
Science Communicator
Phone +46 (0)8 674 70 11
stella.papadopoulou@aces.su.se

Project Info

Project start: 2017

Funded by

Development of CASCADE was supported by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant CC-TOP 695331 to Örjan Gustafsson), the EU H2020-funded project Nunataryuk (grant 773421), and the Swedish Research Council (grant 2017-01601). Field campaigns to obtain gap-filling samples were supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW contract 2011.0027 to Örjan Gustafsson) as part of the SWERUS-C3 program, as well as by the Russian Science Foundation (grant 21-77-30001 to Igor Semiletov) and the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education (grant 0211-2021-0010 to Pacific Oceanological Institute, Vladivostok). Furthermore, this study was supported by the assignment of the Russian Academy of Sciences (grant 0128-2021-0005) and the Russian Science Foundation (grant 18-05-60214) to the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology (Evgeny Romankevich, Alexander Vetrov). The collection of sample material in the Barents Sea was supported by the Research Council of Norway (grant 228107 to Michael L. Carroll; grant
223259) and VISTA (grant 6172 to Emmelie K. L. Åström). Gapfilling samples from the Canadian Arctic were supported by the Research Council of Canada (NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2016-05457 to Anna J. Pieńkowski). Bart van Dongen was supported by an NERC research grant (NE/I024798/1) and Jorien Vonk was supported by the Dutch-NWO (Veni grant 863.12.004).