Glaciers in the High Arctic and recent environmental change

Abstract

High Arctic climate change over the last few hundred years includes the relatively cool Little Ice Age (LIA), followed by warming over the last hundred years or so. Meteorological data from the Eurasian High Arctic (Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya) and Canadian High Arctic islands are scarce before the mid-20th century, but longer records from Svalbard and Greenland show warming from about 1910-1920. Logs of Royal Navy ships in the Canadian Northwest Passage in the 1850s indicate temperatures cooler by 1-2.5 °C during the LIA. Other evidence of recent trends in High Arctic temperatures and precipitation is derived from ice cores, which show cooler temperatures (by 2-3 °C) for several hundred years before 1900, with high interdecadal variability. The proportion of melt layers in ice cores has also risen over the last 70-130 years, indicating warming. There is widespread geological evidence of glacier retreat in the High Arctic since about the turn of the century linked to the end of the LIA. An exception is the rapid advance of some surge-type ice masses. Mass balance measurements on ice caps in Arctic Canada, Svalbard and Severnaya Zemlya since 1950 show either negative or near-zero net balances, suggesting glacier response to recent climate warming. Glacier-climate links are modelled using an energy balance approach to predict glacier response to possible future climate warming, and cooler LIA temperatures. For Spitsbergen glaciers, a negative shift in mass balance of about 0.5 m a -1 is predicted for a 1 °C warming. A cooling of about 0.6 °C, or a 23% precipitation increase, would produce an approximately zero net mass balance. A ‘greenhouse-induced’ warming of 1 °C in the High Arctic is predicted to produce a global sea-level rise of 0.063 mm a -1 from ice cap melting.