Evidence for glacial deposits during the Little Ice Age in Ny-Alesund, western Spitsbergen

Palaeo-notch sediments as reliable proxy records for climate change and anthropogenic activities: a short review

“…Similar palaeo-notch sediment was also reported in the Arctic (Yang et al 2017(Yang et al , 2018a(Yang et al , 2019(Yang et al , 2020aYuan et al 2011). A 36-cm-long palaeo-notch sediment profile LDP was collected on Blomstrandhalvøya, Svalbard.…”

“…Based on the above results and findings, more palaeonotch sediments were discovered in the Arctic and used as a reliable proxy material for palaeoclimatic study (Yang et al Fig. 1 The field photos of palaeo-notch sediments , 2018a, b, 2019, 2020aYuan et al 2010Yuan et al , 2011. In fact, geomorphological features of the Kongsfjorden area, Svalbard indicated that many marine caves (namely palaeonotch) are distributed along the coastal regions from the airport area to Ny-Ålesund (Miccadei et al 2016).…”

“…It is noteworthy that the sediments in coastal notches (Fig. 1) have gradually attracted the attention of scientists in recent years and these notch sediments are tentatively used for palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironment reconstruction (Sun et al 2005b(Sun et al , 2006aYang et al 2017Yang et al , 2018aYang et al , b, 2019Yang et al , 2020aYuan et al 2010Yuan et al , 2011. Nonetheless, the currently reported palaeo-notch sediments were mainly distributed in the coastal terraces of Arctic and Antarctica, and few relevant research was conducted in midlow latitudes.…”

“…In fact, geomorphological features of the Kongsfjorden area, Svalbard indicated that many marine caves (namely palaeonotch) are distributed along the coastal regions from the airport area to Ny-Ålesund (Miccadei et al 2016). Therefore, we integrated all the research results (Sun et al 2005b(Sun et al , 2006aYang et al 2017Yang et al , 2018aYang et al , b, 2019Yang et al , 2020aYuan et al 2010Yuan et al , 2011, analysed the proxies of the palaeo-notch sediments as well as its relationship with local climate conditions, and proposed the schematic diagram for the formation process of the palaeo-notch sediment (Fig. 2).…”

“…Moreover, A 118-cm-long palaeo-notch sediment profile YN was sampled on the first terrace of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (Yang et al 2019(Yang et al , 2020aYuan et al 2010Yuan et al , 2011 and it could be divided into three units (0-10 cm, 10-70 cm and 70-118 cm) according to the visual and lithological characteristics. Surprisingly, lots of fossil mollusk shells were discovered in unit 70-118 cm, and unit 10-70 cm was composed of many gravels with different diameters.…”