A glimpse into the northernmost thermo-erosion gullies in Svalbard archipelago and their implications for Arctic cultural heritage

Multi-hazard susceptibility mapping of cryospheric hazards in a high-Arctic environment: Svalbard Archipelago

“…the RTS inventory has increased from 400 polygons to 562 polygons. As for the TEG the updated version of our inventory included 908 polygons, 98 more than what was mapped in a previous study (Nicu et al, 2022c). This final effort brought our inventories to their current and final form, where the mapping procedure covered the whole study area shown in Figure 1 and field surveys have validated some of their positions and extent.…”

“…The inventories are of high value in a climate change context, as they can be of use by a wide range of scientists, such as geomorphologists, climatologists, hydrologists, biologists, archaeologists, as well as stakeholders and local authorities, in their effort to quantify the potential impacts of the two hazards on infrastructure (Hjort et al, 2018;Hjort et al, 2022) and cultural heritage (Nicu et al, 2021a;Nicu et al, 2022c). To explore their characteristics for any of the users and uses mentioned above, below we will summarize the Frequency Area Distributions (FAD) of the two inventories we mapped and in the subsequent sections we will present the results of the susceptibility modelling we performed.…”

“…Thermokarst is a significant threat in Arctic environments, and numerous examples of its negative effects have been reported at various scales, across several ecosystems (Voigt et al, 2019), infrastructure types (Hjort et al, 2018;Hjort et al, 2022), and affecting cultural heritage sites (Nicu et al, 2021a;Nicu et al, 2021b;Nicu et al, 2022c). Aside from these directly observable effects on the ground, permafrost thawing can also release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming (Oberle et al, 2019;Ran et al, 2022).…”

“…This ice-rich transition zone will, if thawed, release excess water that may further initiate small scale fluvial processes and small slumps or grain collapses. TEG can develop both retrogressively upslope and through widening/deepening of the initial incision (Iwahana et al, 2014;Nicu et al, 2022c).…”

“…Over the last years, there has been an increasing interest in studies referring to TS activity in permafrost regions of China (Niu et al, 2015;Xia et al, 2021), Russia (Séjourné et al, 2015), Alaska (Swanson and Nolan, 2018;Swanson, 2021), Canada (Lewkowicz and Way, 2019), and Svalbard (Nicu et al, 2021a). TEG are less studied, except for a few cases in Canada (Godin et al, 2014;Godin et al, 2019), Russia (Sidorchuk, 2019), and Svalbard (Nicu et al, 2022c). Hardly any of these research efforts though have focused on learning from past TS and TEG occurrences to estimate locations where they may form in the future (Yin et al, 2021).…”