Rapidly receding glaciers on Baffin Island reveal long covered Arctic landscapes

Rapidly receding glaciers on Baffin Island reveal long covered Arctic landscapes 

The study, published  today in the journal Nature Communications uses radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of plants collected at the edges of 30 ice caps on Baffin Island, west of Greenland.

The island has  experienced significant summertime warming in recent decades.

"The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, so naturally, glaciers and ice caps are going to react faster," said Simon Pendleton, lead author and a doctoral researcher in Cu Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Baffin is the world's fifth largest island, dominated by deeply incised separated by high- elevation, low-relief  plateaus The thin, cold plateau ice acts as a kind of natural cold storage, preserving ancient moss and lichens in their original growth position for millennia.

In August, the researchers collected 48 plants sample from 30 different Baffin ice caps, encompassing a range of elevations and  exposures. They also sampled quartz from each site in order to further establish the age and ice cover history of the landscape. Once the samples were processed and radiocarbon dated back in labs at the institute of Arctic and Alpine research at CU Boulder and the University of California Irvine, the researchers found that these ancient plants at all 30 ice caps have likely been continuously covered by ice for at least the past 40,000 years.

"Unlikely biology, which has spent the past three billion years developing schemes to avoid being impacted by climate change, glaciers have no strategy for survival," said Gifford Miller, senior author of the research and a professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder.

When compared against temperature data reconstructed from Baffin and Greenland ice cores, the finding suggest that modern temperatures represent the warmest century for the region in 115,000 years and that Baffin could be completely ice-free with in the next few centuries.

Additional co-authors of the study include Scott Lehman, Sarah  Crump and Robert Anderson of CU Boulder, Nathaniel Lifton of  Purdue University and John  Southon of the University of California Irvine. The National Science Foundation provided funding for the research.