The Nansen Legacy Paleo cruise was part of the work package ‘Physical drivers’ (Research Foci 1), with the overriding objective to reconstruct the natural variability and range of sea ice cover and Atlantic Water through flow in the Barents Sea on longer time scales. 

During the cruise, twelve “paleo stations” were identified using multibeam and sub-bottom profilers. At these stations, short and long sediment cores were obtained, securing the material necessary for analysis of living and fossil foraminiferal faunas in addition to fossil diatoms and dinocysts. Further extraordinary long sediment cores were obtained at three sites using a calypso corer. A new length record for Norwegian sediment coring operations was set with the retrieval of a 21.6 m long sediment core. The cruise also deployed four oceanographic moorings and one ARGO float.