New review of surging glaciers in Svalbard!

I am pleased to share our new paper in which we review the current distribution of surging glaciers in Svalbard! Published in Earth Science Reviews, you can find the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825226000218

In this review, we analyse the methods use to detect glacier surges in the past and present using remote sensing techniques, geophysical methods, and palaeo-glaciological analysis such as landforms, historical imagery and archival maps. Through this review, we develop a new database of glacier surges in Svalbard, which you can find here: https://zenodo.org/records/18033216

We find that 36% of glaciers in Svalbard have evidence of having surged in the past – this accounts for 75% of the total glacier area in Svabard. Therefore, surge-type glaciers have a very large impact on the state of glaciers across the archipelago.

We find that there is a continuum of glacier type behaviour on Svalbard, in line with other areas such as Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and the Himalayan region.

Moving forward, there are critical knowledge gaps that we need to fill, particularly understanding the impacts of glacier surges on mass balance, as well as better understanding the evolution of surges in the past and present in response to changing climate.