Mass balance and related topics of the Greenland ice sheet. Report of the 4th workshop

The Fourth Workshop on 'Mass Balance and Related Topics of the Greenland Ice Sheet' was held at the Fysisch Geografisch en Bodemkundig Laboratorium of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands from 22 to 24 November 1993 . The workshop attracted 35 registrered participants from Europe and North America, and was also followed by a number of Dutch students.

In the Introduction to Open File Series 93/5, which contains the extended abstracts to the Third Workshop, it is stated that the workshops were started as a forum to exchange and discuss mass and energy balance studies carried out in Greenland by Austrian, Danish, Dutch, German and Swiss groups. Furthermore it was stated hopefully that the workshops should develop into real symposia dealing with all aspects of Greenland glaciology.

Although the size of the Fourth Workshop was similar to that of the Third, the number of countries represented increased from five to eight as researchers from Belgium, France and the USA participated in the Fourth Workshop. In this sense the Fourth Workshop was another step towards reaching 'real' symposium status. An essential purpose of the workshops is to discuss and exchange results of the preceding summer's campaign. As such many of the presentations, and consequently the abstracts, should not be considered as 'matured' products of research. Instead some contributions express ideas, or present the results of trials, which later appear in the form of papers in Journals. It is hoped that a change towards real symposia on Greenland glaciology will not conflict with this essential trait of the workshops.

Most, if not all, of the European groups active in glaciological research in Greenland seem to be represented at the workshops. However, there is ongoing research on the Holocene development of the Greenland Ice Sheet that is hardly represented up to now. It is hoped that future Workshops will attract representatives of this paleo-glaciological component. The next opportunity will be the Fifth Workshop, which will be held in Innsbruck, Austria, in November 1994.