Wiesław Ziaja

Glacial Recession in Sorkappland and Central Nordenskioldland, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, during the 20th Century

Major deglaciation on Spitsbergen has occurred as a result of climate warming since the beginning of the 20th century following the end of the Little Ice Age. The areal extent of glaciers has decreased by ca. 18% in Sørkappland between 1936 and 1991, and by ca. 44% in the Lindströmfjellet-Håberget-Håbergnuten ridge region, a mountainous massif of Nordenskiöldland, between 1936 and 1995. Recession of glaciers has been accompanied by a decrease in thickness up to 50 m for almost all glaciers since 1936. The equilibrium-line altitude has risen by 100 to 200 m in Sørkappland and by at least 150 m in central Nordenskiöldland. Deglaciation in central Nordenskiöldland is more than twice that in Sørkappland during the 20th century, which suggests that central Spitsbergen is more sensitive to global warming than is southern Spitsbergen. Spitsbergens proximity to maritime air masses is probably a more important control for rate of glacial recession than is elevation above sea level or high latitude.

Response of the Nordenskiöld Land (Spitsbergen) glaciers Grumantbreen, Håbergbreen and Dryadbreen to the climate warming after the Little Ice Age

Abstract Three receding glaciers on Spitsbergen were examined on the basis of a 1936 topographic map and field investigations during the summers of 1995 and 2001. Håbergbreen, the largest glacier, has undergone the most intensive recession due to its relatively low altitude. There are two important manifestations of glacial recession: (1) the retreating glaciers leave rocky outcrops in the upper or steeper mountain slopes, and (2) the edges of moving glacier tongues are being transformed into motionless ice-cored moraines in valleys. The glaciers under study have not been transformed into rock glaciers. The recession rate has been increasing since 1995, which can be interpreted as a result both of positive feedback initiated by 20th-century climate warming and of slight warming in the 1990s. The glaciers have not thawed enough in relation to the warming and rise of the equilibrium-line altitude (by at least 250–300 m since the beginning of the 20th century). Håbergbreen, already split up into four ice patches, will disappear without a sustained temperature decrease during the next few decades. Grumantbreen and Dryadbreen will survive as small mountain glaciers if winter snow precipitation does not increase.

Spitsbergen Landscape under 20th Century Climate Change: Sørkapp Land

Abstract A reaction of the European Arctic landscape to a climate change on the scale of a typical middle-sized region is outlined. A wide scope of the methods was used, first of all field mapping and observations. Glaciers are important in the Sørkapp Land landscape because they cover the majority of its territory and undergo quick recessions as a result of the 20th century warming. Glacial recession influence intensively: relief with Quaternary deposits, waters, animals, vegetation and soils. The most important landscape changes in the 20th century are: uplift of the equilibrium line altitude on glaciers by 100–200 m; large glacial recession in both surface and volume; significant decrease of the land area due to recession of tidewater glaciers; lengthening of the coastline, and especially of glacial cliffs; development of the land water network; start of the plant succession in areas abandoned by glaciers. No isostatic uplift has taken place in Sørkapp Land since the Little Ice Age.

Coastal Landscape Dynamics in NE Sørkapp Land (SE Spitsbergen), 1900–2005

Abstract This report presents the current dynamics of the natural environment and landscape in a part of the mountainous southeastern Spitsbergen coast on the Barents Sea in 1900–2005. Its current state substantially varies from what is shown on recently published topographic maps actual for 1936. The physico-geographical mapping and GPS survey were the basic field methods of recognizing the area, supplemented by remote sensing. Each landscape component, except for the Pre-Quaternary bedrock, has been changed primarily as a direct or indirect result of the current warming. The most dramatic landscape transformation has been connected with the formation of a fjord, the abandoning of the lower parts of valleys by tidewater glaciers, and the alteration of the coastline. This transformations pace has been increasing visibly over the last few decades. The landscape became more diversified. There is a positive feedback in the process of life expansion in the study area: the processes of animal colonization and plant succession stimulate each other.

Transformation of the natural environment in Western Sørkapp Land (Spitsbergen) since the 1980s

Western Sorkapp Land is a very remote and diverse region, which is representative of the European Arctic.This book describes the transformation of the environment and landscape of Western Sorkapp Land based on research data collected by Jagiellonian University scientific expeditions in the period 1980-1986 and 2008. Western Sorkapp Land has been experiencing dramatic natural changes such as glacial recession, the emergence of new landforms and Quaternary deposits as well as changes in the water drainage and network due to global warming. The establishment of South Spitsbergen National Park has led to a regeneration of the local reindeer herd and consequently the overgrazing of the local tundra resulting in altered plant communities. The transformation of Western Sorkapp Land will continue and its potential directions are outlined in the book.

Components of the Natural Environment

Western Sorkapp Land geological structure is very varied. Pre-Quaternary bedrock consists of three complexes: (1) the most extensive rocks from the Middle Proterozoic to the Silurian, folded in the Caledonian Orogeny: dolomites, phyllites, schists, quartzites, limestones, sandstones, breccias, and others; (2) Early Carboniferous clastic sediments: sandstones, including quartzitic sandstones, siltstones, and shales; and (3) Triassic sedimentary rocks: sandstones and conglomerates. None of these complexes lies horizontally. Loose Quaternary deposits (marine, glacial, fluvial, organic, frost-weathering, slope, including talus and solifluction) are not continuous. The climate is Arctic and marine-type. Average annual temperatures vary from −9 to −3 °C there. Average annual precipitation totals reach 300–500 mm. The mountains in northwest Sorkapp Land remain free of glaciers due to their exposure to relatively warm and dry eastern foehn winds. All the lowlands are unglaciated too. Sorkapp Land glaciation is clearly Arctic-type for two reasons: the common presence of permafrost, and the very weak influence of altitude on the distribution and extent of glaciers. The principal landform types in western Sorkapp Land are coastal lowlands, mountains, and mountain valleys. Nonglacial rivers and lakes (supplied directly by atmospheric precipitation and an active layer of permafrost) play an important part. There are also karst springs and glacial rivers and lakes in the northeast and southeast of the study area. Typically for the High Arctic, the flora of western Sorkapp Land is dominated by cryptogams, mainly lichens—about 170 species—whereas vascular plant flora includes 82 species. Different vegetation types often create complex mosaics, following diverse habitat conditions (bedrock, terrain relief, hydrology, etc.). In a few places the presence of seabird colonies has a local but strong impact on the vegetation.

Conclusions and Prognosis for Environmental Change

The first and direct result of climate warming has been glacial recession, which stimulated an entire process of landscape (and seascape) changes along the eastern boundary between western Sorkapp Land (devoid of glaciers) and the glaciated peninsula interior. A completely new landscape has appeared there. Also fore-fields of glaciers have been indirectly influenced by the glaciers’ retreat. Some sequences of non-glacial and non-postglacial coastline have been affected by an increase in the geomorphic activity of the sea due to a shorter sea-ice season. During the next few decades, the described trend of environmental-landscape transformation will continue unless the climate cools down. In the case of a progressive warming, the extensive tongues of big glaciers will first retreat and then disappear. The main result of that would be an expansion of non-glacial landscape, vegetation and animal life to the east, into the currently glaciated peninsula’s interior. On the basis of repeated vegetation mapping, significant changes in composition and extent of several plant communities were documented. Decrease in species diversity, leading to a more uniform vegetation, has been observed mainly in dry habitats. In some cases boundaries between plant communities that were clear in the 1980s, have now vanished. Fruticose epigeic lichens, like Flavocetraria nivalis, Cladonia rangiferina, and other species of Cladonia have disappeared from the most part of the study area and their extent is now limited to steep rocky slopes. In some communities increase in abundance of Salix polaris was recorded. The main cause of vegetation changes in Sorkapp Land is the rapidly growing reindeer population in the area.

Introduction: Study Area and Its Environmental Recognition

Sorkapp Land, and especially its western part, has been chosen as a destination of Jagiellonian University scientific expeditions since 1980. Geographic locations and natural environmental features make this isolated and mountainous region unique in the European Arctic. This southern Spitsbergen peninsula constitutes a land wedge (which narrows to the south) between different seas. Its eastern coast is affected by the cold sea current, whereas the western one is under influence of warm Atlantic water. These factors help generate a great deal of variety in the peninsula’s natural environment: from the western and southern lowlands overgrown by tundra with herds of reindeer to the glacial mountainous Arctic desert in the interior and east. Therefore, the peninsula is an excellent study area featuring all the relationships between the different components of the natural environment. They result in an unusually diverse, completely natural, and almost primeval landscape: glacial and periglacial, mountainous and low-lying, inland and coastal. These basic landscape types are internally differentiated: for example, fjord-type coastal landscape and open-ocean–type coastal landscape. Traces of the Pleistocene ice sheet may be discovered in the contemporary landscape. In addition, the reaction of this environment to climate warming can be readily noted due to relatively rapid climate fluctuations since the 1980s. New climate phenomena and associated trends can be easily observed in this area.

Environmental and Landscape Changes

Climate changes in western Sorkapp Land mirror global fluctuations. The Little Ice Age ended with a cold period in the 1890s. A warm contemporary period began in the early twentieth century. Afterwards, secondary cold and warm climate fluctuations occurred. The most recent fluctuation, since the 1980s, shows a significant warming trend. The mean annual temperature increased by almost 2 °C and the mean annual total precipitation increased by about 60 mm since the 1980s (according to data of the station located 10 km from the study area). Almost all the snow patches melt during the warmest and sunniest summer seasons. The so-called active layer of permafrost had doubled at sites below 100 m of altitude from the 1980s to 2008. Almost all Sorkapp Land glaciers have undergone a continuous recession since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two processes are important for glacier recession: decrease in snow accumulation in firn fields due to the summer thawing of a larger snow mass, and summer thawing of ice on the surface of glacier tongues, which results in a decrease in ice thickness. Thus, the equilibrium-line altitude of a glacier shifts upward, reducing the accumulation zone. Hence, the entire surface of the glaciers undergoes lowering each year, which results in a decrease in their volume and their overall retreat. Since the 1980s, an acceleration of the glaciers’ recession has occurred, causing great changes in landforms and Quaternary. New accumulation landforms appeared in the front of glaciers and around glacier tongues in their marginal zones, that is, on lowlands and valley floors abandoned by glaciers and in their forefields situated below the marginal zones (i.e., beyond the former extent of the glaciers). New erosion landforms, apart from proglacial river incisions, prevail on the steep slopes of valleys and mountain massifs. The cliffs of tidewater glaciers undergo the quickest retreat. Karst processes have intensified due to higher air temperatures and larger quantities of flowing water. Surface and underground streams carry much more water today than in the 1980s. However, the soil is generally drier on the lowlands between the streams today due to the deepening of the active layer above the permafrost. The river and lake network changed the most due to glacier recession. Ice-dammed lakes disappeared due to the recession of glaciers. On the basis of repeated vegetation mapping, significant changes in composition and extent of several plant communities were documented. Decrease in species diversity, leading to a more uniform vegetation, has been observed mainly in dry habitats. In some cases boundaries between plant communities that were clear in the 1980s have now vanished. Fruticose epigeic lichens, such as Flavocetraria nivalis, Cladonia rangiferina, and other species of Cladonia have disappeared from the most part of the study area and their extent is now limited to steep rocky slopes. In some communities increase in abundance of Salix polaris was recorded. The main cause of vegetation changes in Sorkapp Land is the rapidly growing reindeer population in the area.

An Arctic char observed in a glacial Spitsbergen river

An anadromous Arctic char (male) was recorded in southwestern Spitsbergen, in a very muddy glacial river, in August 2008. This is apparently the first specimen of this species observed in such an unfavourable habitat in Svalbard. Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus), the only freshwater native fish in Svalbard, is rather common (occurring in more than 100 lakes and watercourses) and is differentiated into two forms: stationary and anadromous (Overrein and Prestrud 2006). In southern Spitsbergen (south of Van Keulenfjorden), the Arctic char ecology is well investigated and described. There are several papers on this fish in the water bodies of Wedel Jarlsberg Land, north of the Hornsund fjord (for example: Gullestad 1975, Witkowski and others 2008). The Svartvatnet lake (0.8 km2), connected with the sea by the Lisbetelva river 3,5 km long, is considered to be the only habitat of the Arctic char in Sorkapp Land, the southernmost peninsula of Spitsbergen (south of Hornsund). It was known to the trappers before the establishment of the South Spitsbergen National Park in 1973 as is evidenced by remains of their fishing activity found on the lake in 1982, and recognized by researchers (Gullestad and Klemsten 1997, Kusznierz and others 2008). However, apart from Svartvatnet, the fish was observed by the author in a small lake on the Sergeevskaret pass between the Sergeevfjellet and Lidfjellet mountains, with the water-table at an altitude of ca. 150 m, in the summer seasons 1983 and 1984. This fish does not exist in any other water body of Sorkapp Land, according to observations made during nine summer seasons in the period from 1982 to 2008. Hence, it appeared extraordinary to discover, on 8 August 2008, that it was also present in the glacial Bungeelva river. A single fish was seen in a very shallow lateral bed and was caught by hand, after walking across this very muddy (silted up) and braided river 250 m from its mouth on the Greenland Sea during low tide. It was a male 46 cm long, completely dazed because of a huge amount of suspended material in the river water (Figs. 1–4). Two colleagues of the author, Justyna Dudek and Jan Niedzwiecki, were witnesses. Undoubtedly, the (anadromous) fish had mistaken its way to its maternal stream for spawning during a high tide because the thaw-lakes within the marginal zone of the Bungebreen glaciers (from which the Bungeelva exits) are extremely muddy and making fish life impossible. According to opinions expressed by some biologists in my discussion, the event described above is a very interesting observation of a natural way of animal colonisation (expansion) to new potential habitats which can appear as a result of glaciers’ recession under climate warming. Of course, this unintended trial made by our fish was unsuccessful because the Bungebreen glacier still exists (in spite of shrinking) filling its valley and delivering a huge amount of the suspended material to the new water bodies in its marginal zone and fore-field. However, even there, the situation could be changed in future, after transformation of today’s extensive valley glacier into a smaller new cirque or slope glacier (or glaciers) and thus cleaning the river water. Such a transformation is very probable in the case of further climate warming or stabilising at the present temperature level during the next few decades (Ziaja 2004, 2011a, 2011b). A more difficult question is what a water body the fish wanted to swim into. According to the cited literature, the nearest habitat of the anadromous Arctic char is in the Revelva river basin (with the Revvatnet lake) north of Hornsund. However, the thesis that the Svartvatnet lake can not contain any anadromous form of the fish because the Listetelva river is ‘impassable to ascending fish’ due to ‘the steep rise in the lower part of the stream’ located ‘about 50 m before entering Hornsund’ (Gullestad and Klemsten 1997) or ‘numerous waterfalls’ (Kusznierz and others 2008) is rather doubtful in the light of the author’s geomorphological and hydrological observations of the river. Moreover, the specimen from Bungeelva (Fig. 2) is very similar to specimens ‘from the landlocked population of ( . . . ) Svartvatnet’ and not to the anadromous ones from Revvatnet (Figs. 3 and 4 in: Kusznierz and others 2008). In addition, the fish from Bungelva is practically identical with 7–8 male fish caught by the author in Svartvatnet during mid-August 1983, 1984, and 1986. Nevertheless, no fish have been observed in the lower part of Lisbetelva (which is very clean non-glacial river) despite careful explorations during six summer seasons (1982, 1983,1984, 1986, 2000, and 2008).