Glacier Surface Mass Balance in the Suntar-Khayata Mountains, Northeastern Siberia

Abstract

Arctic glaciers comprise a small fraction of the world’s land ice area, but their ongoing mass loss currently represents a large cryospheric contribution to the sea level rise. In the Suntar-Khayata Mountains (SKMs) of northeastern Siberia, in situ measurements of glacier surface mass balance (SMB) are relatively sparse, limiting our understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns of regional mass loss. Here, we present SMB time series for all glaciers in the SKMs, estimated through a glacier SMB model. Our results yielded an average SMB of −0.22 m water equivalents (w.e.) year−1 for the whole region during 1951–2011. We found that 77.4% of these glaciers had a negative mass balance and detected slightly negative mass balance prior to 1991 and significantly rapid mass loss since 1991. The analysis suggests that the rapidly accelerating mass loss was dominated by increased surface melting, while the importance of refreezing in the SMB progressively decreased over time. Projections under two future climate scenarios confirmed the sustained rapid shrinkage of these glaciers. In response to temperature rise, the total present glacier area is likely to decrease by around 50% during the period 2071–2100 under representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5).

Contemporary state of glaciers in Chukotka and Kolyma highlands

“…Present glaciation is represented by a wide variety of glaciers. Despite intensification of glaciological research in north-eastern Siberia in recent decades (Takahashi et al 2011;Ananicheva and Karpachevsky 2015;Kitov and Plyusnin 2015;Osipov and Osipova 2015;Stepanova et al 2015;Shirakawa et al 2016;Zhang et al 2019), knowledge about the present state of glaciation in this area remains incomplete. Even now, glacial formations not previously described are found (Ananicheva et al 2019).…”