Decelerated mass loss of Hurd and Johnsons Glaciers, Livingston Island, Antarctic Peninsula

Recent Deceleration of the Ice Elevation Change of Ecology Glacier (King George Island, Antarctica)

“…This led to a large scale retreat of glacial fronts an rapid glacial change, including the disintegration of the Larsen A and B ice shelves [16,17]. However, it was shown by Turner et al [18], Oliva et al [19] that since 1999 a regional cooling has been observed, which has also influenced the behaviour of the cryosphere [19,20]. Air temperature records from the Bellingshausen Station (Figure 1; [21]) confirmed that for the 2012-2015 period a significant cooling was observed during summer months on the Fildes Peninsula, King George Island.…”

“…Overall, the ice caps and glaciers of this region are one of the major sources of current sea level rise contributing 0.22 mm a −1 [22], compared to 0.47 ± 0.23 mm a −1 for the entire Greenland Ice Sheet between 1991-2015 [23]. Nonetheless, there is a large uncertainty concerning the volume change of glaciers in the Antarctic periphery, as the ground based measurements are relatively scarce [20,24]. King George Island is the largest island in the South Shetland Islands archipelago (Figure 2a,b).…”

“…A major part of the island is covered by an ice cap divided into five main ice basins: three connected domes along the main ridge (A-Bellingshausen, B-Arctowski and C-unnamed), and Kraków and Warszawa Icefields on the southern peninsulas [25]. Despite there being a number of published glacial extent change studies (e.g., [25][26][27][28][29]), only a few studies of glacier volume change in the South Shetland Islands area have been conducted (e.g., [20,26,30]). The majority of ice volume change studies covering this region are still based on volume-area scaling (e.g., [22,31]), with little in situ data that could provide robust validation.…”

La deglaciación de las áreas libres de hielo de las islas Shetland del Sur (Antártida). Ejemplos de Byers (Livingston) y Barton (King George)

“…En este archipiélago, pequeñas variaciones en los valores medios de temperatura y/o precipitación pueden conllevar cambios significativos en los balances de masa glaciar (Navarro et al, 2013;Osmanoglu et al, 2014). Durante el Holoceno, la elevada sensibilidad climática de estas islas ha comportado numerosos avances y retrocesos glaciares en respuesta a las oscilaciones climáticas (O'Cofaigh et al, 2014).…”

Active layer thermal regime in two climatically contrasted sites of the Antarctic Peninsula region

“…Estimated precipitation is ca. 500-800 mm in the form of both rain and snow in the summer and snow in winter, resulting in snow cover for 8 to 9 months per year (Bañón et al, 2013, Navarro et al, 2013.…”