Lateglacial and Holocene glacier activity in the Van Mijenfjorden area, western Svalbard
- PDF / 13,943,885 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 187 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Lateglacial and Holocene glacier activity in the Van Mijenfjorden area, western Svalbard Eiliv Larsen1 · Astrid Lyså1 · Lena Rubensdotter1,2 · Wesley R. Farnsworth2,3 · Maria Jensen2 · Marie J. Nadeau4 · Dag Ottesen1 Received: 8 December 2017 / Accepted: 27 March 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Sedimentological, morphological and chronological studies of the Van Mijenfjorden region, Svalbard suggest numerous glacial advances seen in terrestrial and marine archives spanning from the Late Weichselian to the Little Ice Age. Only one ice-marginal deposit from the retreat phase of the fjord glacier is found along the entire fjord system. The deposit is located at a topographically controlled position near a bedrock threshold at the mouth of the fjord. Glacial records from tributary valleys and fjords correspond to varying sizes and styles of ice flow related to the deglaciation of the area during the Lateglacial and early Holocene as well as the regrowth of glacier systems during the early Holocene, the Neoglacial and the Little Ice Age. During the Younger Dryas, as the Van Mijen-fjord glacier retreated, a glacier advance took place in a southern tributary, probably as a dynamic response to the retreat in the fjord. Another glacier advance from a northern tributary valley took place during the early Holocene. This glacier advance extended to a position well outside the Little Ice Age (LIA) margins during a period in time when marine proxies suggest warm regional fjords. A Neoglacial glacier advance is identified in a third and inner tributary which also extends further than the subsequent LIA maximum. The Paula glacier system in the inner part of the fjord surged at least five times in the last 650 years, with each subsequent surge advance exhibiting less extensive maximum than the previous, resulting in an overall decrease in mass of the Paula glacier. Keywords Weichselian · Holocene · Deglaciation · Glacial history · Glacier surges · Svalbard
Introduction Ice sheets and glaciers respond to changes in climate through the complex interactions between external climate forcing and internal ice dynamics, both of which are influenced by Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s41063-018-0042-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Eiliv Larsen [email protected] 1
Geological Survey of Norway, Torgard, P.O. Box 6315, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
2
UNIS, The University Centre in Svalbard, P.O. Box 156, 9171 Longyearbyen, Norway
3
UiT, The Arctic University of Norwegian, Tromsø, P.O. Box 6050, 9037 Tromsö, Norway
4
The National Laboratory for Age Determination, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
spatial and topographic variables [23, 73]. Thus, deducing past climate from glacier variations is complicated, as evidenced by large regional differences in ages of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ice sheet extent [21, 40, 69]. A
Data Loading...
