Mass balance and related topics of the Greenland ice sheet. Report of the 3rd workshop.Held at Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar- and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany, 30th November - 2nd December 1992

The Workshop on "Mass Balance and Related Topics of the Greenland Ice Sheet" held at Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar- and Marine Research (AWi), Bremerhaven, Germany on 30th November - 2nd December 1992 was the third workshop dedicated to mass and energy balance studies of the Greenland ice sheet. Since the first workshop on this subject held at the Geological Survey of Greenland (GGU), Copenhagen 14.-16. November 1990 via the second workshop held in Zermatt, Switzerland 2.-4. December 1991, the number of participants and subjects covered have steadily increased, and the workshop in Bremerhaven was the hitherto most comprehensive.

The workshops were started up as a forum for exchanging and discussing results of mass and energy balance studies carried out in Greenland by Austrian, Danish, Dutch, German and Swiss groups. Despite studies by W. Ambach, A. Bauer and C.S. Benson in the 1950s and 1960s, GGU was the only. institution active in this kind of investigations in Greenland until 1989. In 1989, AWi initiated mass balance studies in Northeast Greenland and University of Utrecht (IMAU), The Netherlands and ETH Zurich, Switzerland started mass and energy balance studies in w�st Greenland. Originally, the investigations by AWi, GGU and IMAU took place under The EPOCH programme "Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Associated Impacts in Europe" funded by the EC. The EPOCH programme has now finished, but the three institutions continue the studies on Greenland mass and energy balance and ice sheet dynamics under the EC ENVIRONMENT programme 1993-1994.

The increasing interest for the workshops, also from other groups, indicates that there is a general need for meetings dealing with Greenland glaciology, and it is hoped that the workshops may eventually develop into real symposiq dealing with all aspects of Greenland glaciology as a counterpart to the already institutionalized International Symposia on Antarctic Glaciology.

At the workshop at A WI it was decided for the first time to publish a report of extended abstracts of the presentations given at the meeting. GGU has offered to publish the abstracts from the A WI workshop as a GGU Open File Report, and furthermore, in collaboration with future host institutions, to publish similar abstract volumes for future workshops.