Mountain glacier fluctuations during the Lateglacial and Holocene on Clavering Island (northeastern Greenland) from 10Be moraine dating

• Published in: Boreas
• Main Authors: Biette, M, Jomelli, V, Chenet, M, Rinterknecht, V, Braucher, R, Lane, TP, Aumaitre, G, Boules, D, Keddadouche, K
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2020
• Subjects: G Geography (General); GB Physical geography; Greenland; Clavering Island; glacier; greenlandic
• Online Access: http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/13207/; https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/13207/8/Mountain%20glacier%20fluctuations%20during%20the%20Lateglacial%20and%20Holocene%20on%20Clavering%20Island%20%28northeastern%20Greenland%29%20from%2010Be%20moraine%20dating.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1111/bor.12460

Despite an increasing interest in Greenlandic mountain glaciers over the last decades, their evolution during the Lateglacial and Holocene still needs to be better constrained. Here we present 25 10Be cosmic-ray exposure (CRE) ages of boulders collected on moraines from three glaciers located on Clavering Island (northeastern Greenland). CRE ages span 16.29±0.79 ka to 0.37±0.05 ka and reveal three periods of moraine formation during the Lateglacial, the early and the late Holocene. Data show a multimodal distribution of the ages during the Lateglacial with exposure ages spanning from 16.29±0.79 ka to 12.31±1.3 ka. At least two glaciers experienced a greater expansion at the beginning of the Holocene than at the end of the Holocene, dated to 11.3±0.3 ka and 10.8±0.6 ka, respectively. At the end of the Holocene, glacial advances occurred during the Dark Ages Cold Period and the during the Little Ice Age (LIA), synchronous with glacial advances documented in nearby lake sediments. This new CRE chronology highlights that the LIA extent is not the largest glacier advance in the Late Holocene in Clavering Island. This broadly corresponds with other mountain glaciers of western and northern Greenland, and does not appear to reflect northern high latitude summer insolation that would suggest progressive temperature decrease, but instead mimics recent regional continental temperature reconstructions that show a long term warming driven by different forcing.