Neoglacial plateau ice cap behaviour in central Spitsbergen constrained by subglacially preserved vegetation

Concerns about ice retreat and warming climate are gaining importance and tentative modelling of the future is becoming essential. There is then a growing need for studying palaeo-analogues of existing ice bodies in order to better constrain models of future cryospheric response with real data. During glacial advances, vegetation growing close to the margin of a given glacier may become trapped in the snow, and eventually within the basal ice of the growing icecap. Cold based icecaps, where the base of the glacier is frozen to the underlying substrate and is thus not moving, can potentially preserve underlying soil and vegetation caught into it. Across both high-latitude and high-altitude regions, cold based ice caps are retreating under currently warming climatic conditions, and relict vegetation is melting out of their ice margins. Sampling this vegetation when it has melted out of the ice and then dating it using radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry can provide a location-specific timing for the ice advance that initially entombed it. Following the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the warmest period that followed regional deglaciation around 11ka BP, glaciers and icecaps regrew in Svalbard, during a period commonly referred to as the Neoglacial. The timing of this neoglaciation is poorly constrained and is assumed to have been varying for different geographical locations thorough the archipelago. This project focuses on 5 icecaps located in the Isfjord area. Although a number of studies on dating vegetation melting out of ice bodies have been conducted in the North American Arctic few have applied this method in Svalbard despite the abundance of potential field sites. A comparison of the five icecaps would facilitate a valuable understanding of climate evolution and glacier response at a range of different altitudes and settings in central Spitsbergen and provide constraints on former plateau ice cap extent as a baseline for modelling future climate change.