Climate change and the deteriorating archaeological and environmental archives of the Arctic

Hollesen, Jørgen; Callanan, Martin; Dawson, Tom; Fenger-Nielsen, Rasmus; Friesen, T. Max; Jensen, Anne; Markham, Adam; Martens, Vibeke Vandrup; Pitulko, Vladimir V.; Rockman, Marcy

doi:10.15184/aqy.2018.8

Cited by 107 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The Arctic environment is ideal for long-term preservation of archaeological remains, both for artefacts and environmental proxies [43]; however, studying cultural heritage in the Arctic is quite challenging due to a changing warmer climate [63]. The discovery of Spitsbergen was made by a Dutch crew in 1596 led by Willem Barentsz; this led to a flow of Russians and Europeans craving for glory, money and fame [49].…”

Section: Cultural Heritage Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As shown by Hollesen et al [43], the cold wet climate of the Arctic is the perfect environment in which cultural heritage can be preserved; following the climate variables and tendencies nowadays, the "friendly" environment is slowly disappearing. This leads to a systematic degradation of cultural heritage assets in the Arctic, which is the case of the present study, where coastal cultural heritage is in great danger of being destroyed.…”

Section: Cultural Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Coastal Erosion Affecting Cultural Heritage in Svalbard. A Case Study in Hiorthhamn (Adventfjorden)—An Abandoned Mining Settlement

et al. 2020

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Hiorthhamn is an abandoned Norwegian coal mining settlement with a loading dock and a lot of industrial infrastructure left in the coastal zone. In this study, changes in the position of 1.3 km of the Hiorthhamn shoreline, which affect cultural heritage, is described for a time-period spanning 92 years . The shoreline positions were established based on a map (1927), orthophotos (2009) and a topographic survey with differential Global Positioning System (GPS) (summer 2019). Detailed geomorphological and surface sediment mapping was conducted to form a framework for understanding shoreline-landscape interaction. The shoreline was divided into three sectors to calculate the erosion/stability/accretion rates by using the DSAS (Digital Shoreline Analysis System) extension of ArcGIS. The DSAS analysis showed very high erosion in Sector 1, while Sectors 2 and 3 showed moderate accretion and moderate erosion, respectively. Sector 1 is geologically composed of easily erodible sorted beach sediments and protected remains from the mining industry such as wrecks of heavy machines, loading carts, wagons and rusty tracks that are directly exposed to coastal erosion. The all-sector average shoreline erosion rate (EPR parameter) for the 92 years period was −0.21 m/year. The high shoreline erosion rates in Sector 1, together with the high potential damage to cultural heritage, supports the urgent need of continued coastal monitoring and sustainable management of cultural heritage in Hiorthhamn.Sustainability 2020, 12, 2306 2 of 21 losses in the future. Arctic coastal areas can experience erosion rates similar to, or higher than, those in temperate regions due to the added influence of thawing permafrost and extreme temperatures.Coastal areas located at high latitudes are even more affected by the changes in the environment (e.g., air temperatures, major river discharges and open water season length have increased, and storm tracks and intensities are changing) [6]. The Arctic coastal zone is defined as the region both seaward and landward of the coastlines of the Arctic shelf areas, including all archipelagos and islands [7]. Arctic coastal areas can experience erosion rates similar to or higher than those in temperate regions due to the added influence of thawing permafrost and extreme temperatures, even though the erosional processes are usually still limited to a few months per year [6]. Arctic areas have become important hot spots for studying the effects of a changing climate [8], which is felt earlier there than elsewhere on Earth [9]. The present ongoing research focuses on modelling the velocity of glaciers and ice caps [10], land cover and ice-wedge polygon mapping [11,12], the surface morphology of fans [13], retrogressive thaw slumps triggering [14,15], coastal erosion [16], human impact [17], etc. One of the most exposed Arctic areas is Svalbard, which is experiencing amplified climate change when compared to the global average [18,19]. Svalbard's coastal area is under high pressure from natural [20] and in some area...

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Section: Cultural Heritage Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultural Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

Coastal Erosion Affecting Cultural Heritage in Svalbard. A Case Study in Hiorthhamn (Adventfjorden)—An Abandoned Mining Settlement

et al. 2020

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“…As our only available line of evidence on past human and social responses to climatic variability, lessons from archaeology are critically important to forming future responses to climatic variability (Jackson et al 2018). but just as archaeology studies climatic variability, climate change can destroy sites or their contents: we are rapidly losing archaeological data through erosion, rising sea levels, and thawing of permafrost (Hollesen et al 2018). There is an urgent need for collecting and curating more data before key sediment archives are lost forever.…”

Section: Final Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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John (Jack) Williams 1 is a professor in the Department of Geography and former Director of the Center for Climatic research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Jack currently serves as the Chair of the Leadership Council for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database (neotomadb.org). Jack also serves on the Earthrates Steering Committee and, with Mark Uhen and others, is launching the Earth-Life Consortium (earthlifeconsortium.org) as a non-profit organization dedicated to making paleobiological and paleoecological data free and easy to access. Jack's research emphasizes the spatial and temporal responses of plant species and communities to large, novel, and abrupt environmental changes at local to continental scales. This work is indebted to the gathered data and knowledge of decades of palynologists and paleoecologists. Much of his work in recent years has focused on powering the next generation of high-quality macro-scale science by building, supporting, and interlinking open paleodata resources such as the Paleobiology Database, NOAA-Paleoclimatology, and the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. Alicia Newton 2 graduated from the University of South Carolina, where she used foram geochemistry to reconstruct ocean conditions in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. She spent 11 years as an editor for Nature Geoscience, where she handled paleoceanography among other topics. She helped to roll out policies on data availability and FAIr data at the journal and aided authors in making their data available at the time of publication. She is currently the Director of Science and Communications at the Geological Society of London, UK.

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“…Natural disasters, increasingly more intense and frequent with the backdrop of climate change, pose a tremendous threat for cultural heritage [14,15]. While archaeological sites from the shores of seas and oceans are intensively studied [12,16], sites located on shore areas of large inland artificial reservoirs are seldom considered [17,18]. This is often the case of Chalcolithic sites from NE Romania [19,20], largely affected by at least one or more natural hazards or anthropic interventions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pars pro toto—Remote Sensing Data for the Reconstruction of a Rounded Chalcolithic Site from NE Romania: The Case of Ripiceni–Holm Settlement (Cucuteni Culture)

2020

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Prehistoric sites in NE Romania are facing major threats more than ever, both from natural and human-induced hazards. One of the main reasons are the climate change determined natural disasters, but human-induced activities should also not be neglected. The situation is critical for Chalcolithic sites, with a very high density in the region and minimal traces at the surface, that are greatly affected by one or more natural hazards and/or anthropic interventions. The case study, Ripiceni–Holm, belonging to Cucuteni culture, is one of the most important Chalcolithic discoveries in the region. It is also the first evidence from Romania of a concentric arrangement of buildings in the proto-urban mega-sites tradition in Cucuteni-Trypillia cultural complex, and a solid piece of evidence in terms of irreversible natural and anthropic destruction. Using archival cartographic material, alongside non-destructive and high-resolution airborne sensing and ground-based geophysical techniques (LiDAR, total field and vertical gradient magnetometry), we managed to detect diachronic erosion processes for 31 years, to identify a complex internal spatial organization of the actual site and to outline a possible layout of the initial extent of the settlement. The erosion was determined with the help of the DSAS tool and highlighted an average erosion rate of 0.96 m/year. The main results argue a high percent of site destruction (approximately 45%) and the presence of an active shoreline affecting the integrity of the cultural layer.

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Climate change and the deteriorating archaeological and environmental archives of the Arctic

Cited by 107 publications

References 30 publications

Coastal Erosion Affecting Cultural Heritage in Svalbard. A Case Study in Hiorthhamn (Adventfjorden)—An Abandoned Mining Settlement

Coastal Erosion Affecting Cultural Heritage in Svalbard. A Case Study in Hiorthhamn (Adventfjorden)—An Abandoned Mining Settlement

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Pars pro toto—Remote Sensing Data for the Reconstruction of a Rounded Chalcolithic Site from NE Romania: The Case of Ripiceni–Holm Settlement (Cucuteni Culture)

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