Historical glacier change on Svalbard predicts doubling of mass loss by 2100
Abstract
The melting of glaciers and ice caps accounts for about one-third of current sea-level rise , exceeding the mass loss from the more voluminous Greenland or Antarctic Ice Sheets. The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, which hosts spatial climate gradients that are larger than the expected temporal climate shifts over the next century, is a natural laboratory to constrain the climate sensitivity of glaciers and predict their response to future warming. Here we link historical and modern glacier observations to predict that twenty-first century glacier thinning rates will more than double those from 1936 to 2010. Making use of an archive of historical aerial imagery7 from 1936 and 1938, we use structure-from-motion photogrammetry to reconstruct the three-dimensional geometry of 1,594 glaciers across Svalbard. We compare these reconstructions to modern ice elevation data to derive the spatial pattern of mass balance over a more than 70-year timespan, enabling us to see through the noise of annual and decadal variability to quantify how variables such as temperature and precipitation control ice loss. We find a robust temperature dependence of melt rates, whereby a 1 °C rise in mean summer temperature corresponds to a decrease in area-normalized mass balance of −0.28 m yr−1 of water equivalent. Finally, we design a space-for-time substitution8 to combine our historical glacier observations with climate projections and make first-order predictions of twenty-first century glacier change across Svalbard.
Additional Information
© 2022 Nature Publishing Group. Received 17 June 2021; Accepted 07 December 2021; Published 19 January 2022. We thank F. Simons, C.-Y. Lai, P. Wennberg, P. Moore, B. Dyer, G. Moholdt, R.A. Morris, E. Isaksson, A. Schomacker, C. Nuth, E. Schytt Holmlund and B. Geyman for conversations that improved the manuscript. W.J.J.v.P. acknowledges funding from the Swedish National Space Agency (project 189/18). E.C.G. was supported by a Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Global Scholarship at Princeton University, a Svalbard Science Forum Arctic Field Grant, and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. Data availability: The 1936/1938 Svalbard glacier inventory presented here consists of raster DEMs and orthophotos (5 m resolution), and vector outlines of glacier extents (Extended Data Fig. 3). All data are publicly available on the NPI website (https://www.doi.org/10.21334/npolar.2021.f6afca5c) and on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5806388). In these repositories, we also provide the raw (unprocessed) 3D point clouds as .laz files and a spreadsheet (.xlsx file) containing glacier-by-glacier estimates of area, volume, hypsometry, ∆h/∆t, bed slope, DEM uncertainty and climate fields (mean annual temperature, mean summer temperature, PDDs, precipitation as snow and total precipitation). The original 1936/1938 aerial images and their locations can be viewed at https://toposvalbard.npolar.no/. The 5 m regional DEMs from the 2008–2012 survey33 are available as .tif files from https://publicdatasets.data.npolar.no/kartdata/S0_Terrengmodell/Delmodell/ and the associated 50 cm orthophotomosaic is available as a WMTS layer from https://geodata.npolar.no/#basemap-data. Code availability: The code developed to analyse the 1936–2010 mass balance data and implement the space-for-time substitution is available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5643856). Author Contributions: E.C.G. and J.K. designed the study. E.C.G. performed the SfM reconstructions and the analysis of the data. W.J.J.v.P. assembled and downscaled the regional climate model results. A.C.M. contributed to the formulation of the space-for-time substitution. H.F.A. oversaw the digitization of the 1936/1938 image archive. E.C.G. wrote the manuscript, with edits from all authors. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature thanks Jaime Otero and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.Attached Files
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Supplemental Material - 41586_2021_4314_MOESM3_ESM.xlsx
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 112998
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220119-680483700
- 189/18
- Swedish National Space Agency
- Princeton University
- Svalbard Science Forum
- Fannie and John Hertz Foundation
- Created
-
2022-01-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2022-01-19Created from EPrint's last_modified field