Objective
The ice-covered archipelagoes of Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya are among the least well known areas of the polar regions. Maps are relatively poor, and little is known of the configuration and dynamics of their ice masses. The ice masses of these archipelagoes are of particular importance since they fall along the strong west-east climatic gradient towards lower temperatures and precipitation running through the European high Arctic. They are likely to be particularly sensitive to climate change because their margins end, for the most part, in marine waters, allowing the rapid discharge of mass in the event of reduced precipitation inputs or increasing warmth.
This research has three main aims. The first is to use satellite imagery to map, and to infer the dynamics of, the drainage basins within the ice caps of the Russian high Arctic. This work, conducted mainly through the digital analysis of Landsat data, supplemented by high resolution Russian satellite photographs, will comprise the analysis of imagery from both Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya. A second objective is to undertake field investigations of mass balance, thermal structure, velocity and strain on selected ice caps within Franz Josef Land, in order to quantify the climatic gradient across the archipelago and its effects on ice cap morphology and dynamics. The third objective utilizes and brings together the observational glaciological datasets. It is to model mathematically the response of the ice caps on Franz Josef Land to two types of climate change. The scenarios for climate change are: future global warming and the potential contribution of these ice caps to global sea level change (on timescales of 50-200 years), and climate change over the last glacial-interglacial cycle (approximately the past 100,000 years). The observational datasets obtained from the Russian high Arctic are therefore used as inputs or boundary conditions for numerical modelling studies of the response of this sensitive part of the crysosphere to both past and possible future environmental change.
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
Data not availableCoordinator
CB2 1ER Cambridge
United Kingdom