Nicolaj K. Larsen

Glacial Survival of Boreal Trees in Northern Scandinavia

Tree Refugia Ideas of how and when boreal plants spread to the formerly glaciated parts of the world following the retreat of the glaciers 9000 years ago are long debated. Models of the postglacial spread of boreal plants argue for dispersal from southern refugia; however, Parducci et al. (p. 1083) have shown that both spruce and pine were present in small ice-free regions of Scandinavia much earlier than thought. DNA haplotyping confirmed that a remnant mitochondrial type of spruce, once unique to Scandinavia, now lives alongside the more common spruce originating from Eastern Europe. Evidence from lake cores collected from central and northern Norway indicated the survival of conifers as early as 22,000 years before the present, when apart from ice-free pockets, most of Scandinavia was covered by ice. DNA from modern and ancient spruce and pine indicate that both survived in ice-free areas during the last glaciations. It is commonly believed that trees were absent in Scandinavia during the last glaciation and first recolonized the Scandinavian Peninsula with the retreat of its ice sheet some 9000 years ago. Here, we show the presence of a rare mitochondrial DNA haplotype of spruce that appears unique to Scandinavia and with its highest frequency to the west—an area believed to sustain ice-free refugia during most of the last ice age. We further show the survival of DNA from this haplotype in lake sediments and pollen of Trøndelag in central Norway dating back ~10,300 years and chloroplast DNA of pine and spruce in lake sediments adjacent to the ice-free Andøya refugium in northwestern Norway as early as ~22,000 and 17,700 years ago, respectively. Our findings imply that conifer trees survived in ice-free refugia of Scandinavia during the last glaciation, challenging current views on survival and spread of trees as a response to climate changes.

A 10,000-Year Record of Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Variability-View from the Beach

Sea-ice coverage near northern Greenland and in the western Arctic Ocean varied in opposition over much of the Holocene. We present a sea-ice record from northern Greenland covering the past 10,000 years. Multiyear sea ice reached a minimum between ~8500 and 6000 years ago, when the limit of year-round sea ice at the coast of Greenland was located ~1000 kilometers to the north of its present position. The subsequent increase in multiyear sea ice culminated during the past 2500 years and is linked to an increase in ice export from the western Arctic and higher variability of ice-drift routes. When the ice was at its minimum in northern Greenland, it greatly increased at Ellesmere Island to the west. The lack of uniformity in past sea-ice changes, which is probably related to large-scale atmospheric anomalies such as the Arctic Oscillation, is not well reproduced in models. This needs to be further explored, as it is likely to have an impact on predictions of future sea-ice distribution.

Spatial and temporal distribution of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet since AD 1900

The response of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) to changes in temperature during the twentieth century remains contentious, largely owing to difficulties in estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of ice mass changes before 1992, when Greenland-wide observations first became available. The only previous estimates of change during the twentieth century are based on empirical modelling and energy balance modelling. Consequently, no observation-based estimates of the contribution from the GIS to the global-mean sea level budget before 1990 are included in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here we calculate spatial ice mass loss around the entire GIS from 1900 to the present using aerial imagery from the 1980s. This allows accurate high-resolution mapping of geomorphic features related to the maximum extent of the GIS during the Little Ice Age at the end of the nineteenth century. We estimate the total ice mass loss and its spatial distribution for three periods: 1900–1983 (75.1 ± 29.4 gigatonnes per year), 1983–2003 (73.8 ± 40.5 gigatonnes per year), and 2003–2010 (186.4 ± 18.9 gigatonnes per year). Furthermore, using two surface mass balance models we partition the mass balance into a term for surface mass balance (that is, total precipitation minus total sublimation minus runoff) and a dynamic term. We find that many areas currently undergoing change are identical to those that experienced considerable thinning throughout the twentieth century. We also reveal that the surface mass balance term shows a considerable decrease since 2003, whereas the dynamic term is constant over the past 110 years. Overall, our observation-based findings show that during the twentieth century the GIS contributed at least 25.0 ± 9.4 millimetres of global-mean sea level rise. Our result will help to close the twentieth-century sea level budget, which remains crucial for evaluating the reliability of models used to predict global sea level rise.

Postglacial viability and colonization in North America’s ice-free corridor

During the Last Glacial Maximum, continental ice sheets isolated Beringia (northeast Siberia and northwest North America) from unglaciated North America. By around 15 to 14 thousand calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal. kyr bp), glacial retreat opened an approximately 1,500-km-long corridor between the ice sheets. It remains unclear when plants and animals colonized this corridor and it became biologically viable for human migration. We obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores in a bottleneck portion of the corridor. We find evidence of steppe vegetation, bison and mammoth by approximately 12.6 cal. kyr bp, followed by open forest, with evidence of moose and elk at about 11.5 cal. kyr bp, and boreal forest approximately 10 cal. kyr bp. Our findings reveal that the first Americans, whether Clovis or earlier groups in unglaciated North America before 12.6 cal. kyr bp, are unlikely to have travelled by this route into the Americas. However, later groups may have used this north–south passageway.

Aerial photographs reveal late–20th-century dynamic ice loss in northwestern Greenland

A Picture of Disappearing Ice Global warming is accelerating the loss of ice sheet mass by melting, sublimation, and erosion of their margins. In order to provide a better context for understanding contemporary losses, a longer record of the recent past is needed. Kjær et al. (p. 569) extend the record of thinning along the northwest margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet back to the mid-1980s, by using archived aerial photographs in conjunction with a digital elevation model and comparing their results to more recent data. Northwestern Greenland has experienced two dynamic ice loss events in the past three decades. Local ice loss appears to be caused by a combination of predictable surface processes that operate over decadal time scales and ones that involve the rapid movement of ice over periods of 3 to 5 years that exhibit strong regional differences. Archived photographs extending back to the mid-1980s help show the role of dynamic thinning in ice mass loss from Greenland. Global warming is predicted to have a profound impact on the Greenland Ice Sheet and its contribution to global sea-level rise. Recent mass loss in the northwest of Greenland has been substantial. Using aerial photographs, we produced digital elevation models and extended the time record of recent observed marginal dynamic thinning back to the mid-1980s. We reveal two independent dynamic ice loss events on the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet margin: from 1985 to 1993 and 2005 to 2010, which were separated by limited mass changes. Our results suggest that the ice mass changes in this sector were primarily caused by short-lived dynamic ice loss events rather than changes in the surface mass balance. This finding challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures.

Molecular‐ and pollen‐based vegetation analysis in lake sediments from central Scandinavia

Plant and animal biodiversity can be studied by obtaining DNA directly from the environment. This new approach in combination with the use of generic barcoding primers (metabarcoding) has been suggested as complementary or alternative to traditional biodiversity monitoring in ancient soil sediments. However, the extent to which metabarcoding truly reflects plant composition remains unclear, as does its power to identify species with no pollen or macrofossil evidence. Here, we compared pollen‐based and metabarcoding approaches to explore the Holocene plant composition around two lakes in central Scandinavia. At one site, we also compared barcoding results with those obtained in earlier studies with species‐specific primers. The pollen analyses revealed a larger number of taxa (46), of which the majority (78%) was not identified by metabarcoding. The metabarcoding identified 14 taxa (MTUs), but allowed identification to a lower taxonomical level. The combined analyses identified 52 taxa. The barcoding primers may favour amplification of certain taxa, as they did not detect taxa previously identified with species‐specific primers. Taphonomy and selectiveness of the primers are likely the major factors influencing these results. We conclude that metabarcoding from lake sediments provides a complementary, but not an alternative, tool to pollen analysis for investigating past flora. In the absence of other fossil evidence, metabarcoding gives a local and important signal from the vegetation, but the resulting assemblages show limited capacity to detect all taxa, regardless of their abundance around the lake. We suggest that metabarcoding is followed by pollen analysis and the use of species‐specific primers to provide the most comprehensive signal from the environment.

Microstructures and microshears as proxy for strain in subglacial diamicts : Implications for basal till formation

Ring-shear experiments were used to study subglacial sediment deformation and the development of S-matrix microstructures and microshears to constrain glacially induced deformation in diamicts. The experiments approximated subglacial conditions, and the diamict was sheared and sampled incrementally to strains of 0, 7, 18, 33, 57, and 107. At strains between 7 and 18, a steady association of S-matrix microstructures developed, which did not evolve further despite continued shearing. The I L -index, a measure of microshear-orientation strength parallel to the shearing direction correlates log-linearly with strain, which indicates its potential use as strain proxy. The ring-shear data were compared with the characteristics of Quaternary basal tills from Denmark, Poland, and Svalbard. Based on I L -index values, we conclude that these tills only experienced strain of ∼10 1 , which is orders of magnitude lower than expected for deformation tills. This suggests that pervasive subglacial deformation and sediment advection in the mobile layer at the ice-bed interface may be less significant than previously assumed.

The response of the southern Greenland ice sheet to the Holocene thermal maximum

To determine the long-term sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to a warmer climate, we explored how it responded to the Holocene thermal maximum (8–5 cal. kyr B.P.; calibrated to calendar years before present, i.e., A.D. 1950), when lake records show that local atmospheric temperatures in Greenland were 2–4 °C warmer than the present. Records from five new threshold lakes complemented with existing geological data from south of 70°N show that the ice margin was retracted behind its present-day extent in all sectors for a limited period between ca. 7 and 4 cal. kyr B.P. and in most sectors from ca. 1.5 to 1 cal. kyr B.P., in response to higher atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Ice sheet simulations constrained by observations show good correlation with the timing of minimum ice volume indicated by the threshold lake observations; the simulated volume reduction suggests a minimum contribution of 0.16 m sea-level equivalent from the entire Greenland ice sheet, with a centennial ice loss rate of as much as 100 Gt/yr for several millennia during the Holocene thermal maximum. Our results provide an estimate of the long-term rates of volume loss that can be expected in the future as regional air and ocean temperatures approach those reconstructed for the Holocene thermal maximum.

Discrete element modeling of subglacial sediment deformation

[1] The Discrete Element Method (DEM) is used in this study to explore the highly nonlinear dynamics of a granular bed when exposed to stress conditions comparable to those at the bed of warm-based glaciers. Complementary to analog experiments, the numerical approach allows a detailed analysis of the material dynamics and the shear zone development during progressive shear strain. The geometry of the heterogeneous stress network is visible in the form of force-carrying grain bridges and adjacent, volumetrically dominant, inactive zones. We demonstrate how the shear zone thickness and dilation depend on the level of normal (overburden) stress, and we show how high normal stress can mobilize material to great depths. The particle rotational axes tend to align with progressive shear strain, with rotations both along and reverse to the shear direction. The results from successive laboratory ring-shear experiments on simple granular materials are compared to results from similar numerical experiments. The simulated DEM material and all tested laboratory materials deform by an elastoplastic rheology under the applied effective normal stress. These results demonstrate that the DEM is a viable alternative to continuum models for small-scale analysis of sediment deformation. It can be used to simulate the macromechanical behavior of simple granular sediments, and it provides an opportunity to study how microstructures in subglacial sediments are formed during progressive shear strain.

The presence of thrust-block naled after a major surge event: Kuannersuit Glacier, West Greenland

Abstract Thrust-block naled in front of Kuannersuit Glacier, West Greenland, appears to have formed during the termination of a terrestrial surge event by a combination of enhanced winter runoff, rapid advance of the glacier terminus, and proglacial stress release by thrusting and stacking of naled blocks. This process is equivalent to the formation of thrust-block moraines. The thrust-block naled consists of at least seven thrust sheets, which are characterized by stratified ice with beds composed of a lower debris-rich lamina, an intermediate dispersed lamina and a top clean-ice lamina, and underlain by frozen outwash deposits. The thrust-block naled differs from basal stratified ice in the absence of internal deformation structures, a relatively low debris concentration, a clay-rich particle-size distribution and a preferential sorting of lighter minerals. The oxygen isotope composition of the thrust-block naled is indistinguishable from δ18O values from meteoric glacier ice and bulk meltwater, but different from basal stratified ice facies. The d–δD relationship indicates that thrust-block naled has been formed by freezing of successive thin layers of bulk waters with variable isotopic composition, whereas basal stratified ice has developed in a subglacial environment with regelation. This work shows that the association between proglacial naled and rapidly advancing glaciers may have significant consequences for the proglacial geomorphology and the interpretation of basal ice layers.