Introduction

The 15 th and 16th International Workshop of the Forum for Research on Ice Shelf Processes (FRISP) gathered in total 26 participants from Australia, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

At the moment there is no further details on the Münster workshop available, but the submitted reports have been included here.

The Bergen workshop was held without the present chairman Hans Oerter, and in his place Svein Østerhus wished everybody welcome. It continued with a good update of the different Australian activities on the Amery ice shelf. We hope to see our Australian colleagues again at a later meeting, as FRISP is now scheduled to be a more general forum covering activity on Antarctic Ice Shelves in general.

Adrian Jenkins was elected as the new chairman, and Lars H. Smedsrud as a new editor of the reports/www pages. A new Bjerknes Center for Climate Research (BCCR) has been established in Bergen, and has taken over after AWI in hosting the www pages, and printing reports. The aim of the Bjerknes Centre is to become an acknowledged center for cutting edge climate research and research training in order to further our knowledge of past, present and future climate change with emphasis on Northwest Europe, the Northern Seas, the North Atlantic and the Arctic regions.

There was a small discussion of how we should develop objectives for FRISP in the future, and Ian Allison held out the idea to get funding if we had anything special we wanted to start. Participants find the workshops fruitful as an informal forum for meeting colleagues and important for the exchange of ideas. Everybody would also like to see a continuation of the printed reports, and will submit extended abstracts from the talk given. In addition the papers should be available in PDF format on the FRISP www pages, and these will be available when participants have submitted them to the editor. The next meeting will be during the first half of June in Cambridge.

We thank Hans Oerter, Alfred Wegener Institute, for acting as the chairman since 1999, and for all the effort he has done with publishing the FRISP reports. After the meeting the decision was made to include papers from the two last workshops in this FRISP report No 14 (2006).

Lars H. Smedsrud

Contributions