ABSTRACT

Four archipelagos are located in this area: Svalbard (including North-East Land) Franz-Jozef Land, Novaya Zemlya and Severnaya Zemlya. The northern island of Novaya Zemlya is covered by a large ice sheet with outlet glaciers; the glaciation of the other archipelagos consists of ice caps and valley glaciers, with areas varying from ten to thousands of square kilometers. The maximum altitude of the ice divides ranges from 500–1200m a.s.l. and ice thickness varies from 100 to 700m. These ice caps together with the ice sheet of Novaya Zemlya provide an excellent opportunity to obtain paleoclimatic data with high time resolution. We need, however, to take into account the difference between these glaciers and cold polar ice sheets: ice caps of the Eurasian Arctic are very “warm” not only in comparison with the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, but also compared to the ice caps of Canadian Arctic. Some of them are temperate by Ahlmann's classification (i.e. temperature is at the melting point throughout the glacier) but most of them are subpolar: they have negative internal temperatures though intensive melting occurs every summer on their surfaces. Some data necessary to estimate the surface conditions are given in Table 26.1.