Unlocking archival maps of the Hornsund fjord area for monitoring glaciers of the Sørkapp Land peninsula, Svalbard

• Main Authors: Dudek, Justyna, Pętlicki, Michał
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Hornsund; Svalbard; Sørkapp Land; glacier; Tidewater; Spitsbergen
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-76; https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2021-76/

Archival maps are an invaluable source of information on the state of glaciers in polar zones and are very often basic research material for analysing changes in their geometry. However, basing a reliable comparative analysis on them requires they be standardised and precisely matched against modern-day cartographic materials. This can be achieved effectively using techniques and tools from the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The research objective was to accurately register archival topographic maps of the area surrounding the Hornsund fjord (southern Spitsbergen) published by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and to evaluate their potential for use in studying changes in the geometry of glaciers in the western part of the Sørkapp Land peninsula in 1961–90. Comparing the 1961 and 1990 data, glacier surfaces lowered by about 80–85 m for the largest land-terminating glaciers of the peninsula, and by up to more than 90 m for tidewater glaciers (above the line marking their 1984 extents). The dataset is now available from the Zenodo web portal: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4573130 (Dudek and Pętlicki, 2021).