The Greenland-Scotland Ridge (GSR) determines how much warm, salty Atlantic water reaches the Nordic Seas and the Arctic, and how much dense water spills back south to feed the deep limb of the AMOC. Whether those flows are steady or changing is a difficult question to answer without long-term observational records. At the Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Fluxes (ASOF) meeting in Bergen (21 to 23 April 2026), EPOC researchers brought three decades of such records to the table.
The meeting doubled up as a celebration of 150 years of modern marine research in the Nordic Seas, with its first session open to delegates of the parallel One Ocean Week. Teams from Faroe Marine Research Institute (FAMRI / Havstovan) and the Norway’s Institute of Marine Research presented, Laura de Steur (Norwegian Polar Institute) served as an ASOF co-chair, and following ASOF, James Wyatt (FAMRI) convened a workshop dedicated to the GSR.
The joint ASOF / One Ocean Week session opened with Svein Østerhus (NORCE, Bjerknes Centre) setting the long view: 150 years of research in the Nordic Seas, from the earliest instrumental records to today’s decadal environmental change. It framed the day well. Everything EPOC’s own researchers presented next sits inside that century and a half of observation, the latest instalment in a long-running record rather than a standalone result.
Karin Margretha H. Larsen (FAMRI) presented three decades of North Atlantic to Norwegian Sea exchanges. The takeaway is a reassuring one: the records show no weakening of either the Faroe Current inflow or the Faroe Bank Channel overflow over that period. What is changing is the water’s temperature, not the strength of the flow.
Guðrið Eriksdóttir (FAMRI) traced what happens to that inflow as it crosses the Iceland-Faroe Ridge, in work funded by the Faroe-AMOC project. The Atlantic water cools and freshens on the way over, and that freshening weakens the branch’s potential to form the dense water that ventilates the Arctic. The conditions reaching the ridge follow the pull of the subpolar gyre alongside a broader warming of the North Atlantic.
Randi Ingvaldsen (IMR) presented the Barents Sea Opening record from nearly three decades of moored observations. The Atlantic Water entering the Barents Sea has warmed and freshened, most strongly in the north, and its transport dropped sharply in 2020 to 2021.
Hjálmar Hátún (FAMRI) took part in the summit’s Predicting Our Blue Future session, which examined how ocean observation and modelling can inform decisions about future ocean conditions and the blue economy.
As ASOF ran alongside One Ocean Week, it presented a fantastic opportunity to to take AMOC science into the broader ocean community.
Immediately after ASOF, James Wyatt convened a special-interest GSR workshop at the IMR in Bergen. Around 30 researchers from over 15 institutions attended. The aim was practical: map the knowledge gaps in the ridge observing system and build a strategy for a sustained time series of transport across it.
Wyatt opened by showing how gaps in the Faroe-Shetland Channel inflow record can be reconstructed, Eriksdóttir presented the Atlantic inflow between Iceland and the Faroes, and Larsen set out the Faroe Bank Channel overflow record. The talks spanned the full ridge system, inflow, overflow and modelling, drawn from institutions across the North Atlantic and the Nordic countries.
These figures map who is working on what across the ridge system today. The workshop’s purpose was to connect these separate efforts into one sustained observing strategy rather than leave them as parallel programmes.
The community now holds more data than at any point in its history, yet has less time and fewer people to work it. Coordination across institutions has become the priority rather than an afterthought. The group set up a working list to keep the conversation going.
ASOF’s community will meet again at the next ISSG workshop, in Sopot, Poland, from 24 to 28 May 2027. This follows on from EPOC’s presence at ASOF 2025. EPOC’s Greenland-Scotland Ridge working group plans to reconvene before then to carry forward the strategy set out in Bergen. Stakeholders wanting to follow the ridge observing system as it develops should get in touch directly.
Across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge, three decades of observations show inflow and overflow that are warming and shifting in their properties but not weakening in transport. That is a substantive piece of evidence for AMOC assessment, and it holds only for as long as the observing system behind it is sustained. Closing the ridge’s remaining gaps is what turns a stable record into a genuine early-warning capability.