Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Delta progradation in Greenland driven by increasing glacial mass loss

Nature volume 550, pages 101–104 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Climate changes are pronounced in Arctic regions and increase the vulnerability of the Arctic coastal zone1. For example, increases in melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and reductions in sea ice and permafrost distribution are likely to alter coastal morphodynamics. The deltas of Greenland are largely unaffected by human activity, but increased freshwater runoff and sediment fluxes may increase the size of the deltas, whereas increased wave activity in ice-free periods could reduce their size, with the net impact being unclear until now. Here we show that southwestern Greenland deltas were largely stable from the 1940s to 1980s, but prograded (that is, sediment deposition extended the delta into the sea) in a warming Arctic from the 1980s to 2010s. Our results are based on the areal changes of 121 deltas since the 1940s, assessed using newly discovered aerial photographs and remotely sensed imagery. We find that delta progradation was driven by high freshwater runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet coinciding with periods of open water. Progradation was controlled by the local initial environmental conditions (that is, accumulated air temperatures above 0 °C per year, freshwater runoff and sea ice in the 1980s) rather than by local changes in these conditions from the 1980s to 2010s at each delta. This is in contrast to a dominantly eroding trend of Arctic sedimentary coasts along the coastal plains of Alaska2, Siberia3 and western Canada4, and to the spatially variable patterns of erosion and accretion along the large deltas of the main rivers in the Arctic5,6,7. Our results improve the understanding of Arctic coastal evolution in a changing climate, and reveal the impacts on coastal areas of increasing ice mass loss and the associated freshwater runoff and lengthening of open-water periods.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Progradation in two types of deltas.
Figure 2: Delta changes in the period between 1940s–1980s and 1980s–2010s.
Figure 3: Structural equation model representing connections between delta changes in a progradation period and factors influencing coastal evolution.

References

  1. IPCC Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013)

  2. Jones, B. M. et al. Increase in the rate and uniformity of coastline erosion in Arctic Alaska. Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L03503 (2009)

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  3. Lantuit, H. et al. Coastal erosion dynamics on the permafrost-dominated Bykovsky Peninsula, north Siberia, 1951–2006. Polar Res. 30, 7341 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Lantuit, H. & Pollard, W. H. Fifty years of coastal erosion and retrogressive thaw slump activity on Herschel Island, southern Beaufort Sea, Yukon Territory, Canada. Geomorphology 95, 84–102 (2008)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  5. Lantuit, H. et al. The Arctic Coastal Dynamics database: a new classification scheme and statistics on Arctic permafrost coastlines. Estuaries Coasts 35, 383–400 (2012)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Rachold, V. et al. Coastal erosion vs riverine sediment discharge in the Arctic Shelf seas. Int. J. Earth Sci. 89, 450–460 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Solomon, S. M. Spatial and temporal variability of shoreline change in the Beaufort–Mackenzie region, northwest territories, Canada. Geo-Mar. Lett. 25, 127–137 (2005)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Barnhart, K. R., Miller, C. R., Overeem, I. & Kay, J. E. Mapping the future expansion of Arctic open water. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 280–285 (2015)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  9. Fritz, M., Vonk, J. E. & Lantuit, H. Collapsing Arctic coastlines. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 6–7 (2017)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  10. Overeem, I. et al. Sea ice loss enhances wave action at the Arctic coast. Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L17503 (2011)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  11. Bhatt, U. S. et al. Implications of Arctic sea ice decline for the Earth system. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 39, 57–89 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Stroeve, J. C., Markus, T., Boisvert, L., Miller, J. & Barrett, A. Changes in Arctic melt season and implications for sea ice loss. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 1216–1225 (2014)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  13. Kjeldsen, K. K. et al. Spatial and temporal distribution of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet since ad 1900. Nature 528, 396–400 (2015)

    Article  ADS  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. van den Broeke, M. R. et al. On the recent contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea level change. Cryosphere 10, 1933–1946 (2016)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  15. de Winter, I. L., Storms, J. E. A. & Overeem, I. Numerical modeling of glacial sediment production and transport during deglaciation. Geomorphology 167–168, 102–114 (2012)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  16. Hawkings, J. et al. The Greenland Ice Sheet as a hot spot of phosphorus weathering and export in the Arctic. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 30, 191–210 (2016)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  17. Hawkings, J. R. et al. The effect of warming climate on nutrient and solute export from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Geochem. Persp. Lett. 1, 94–104 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Pedersen, J. B. T. et al. Fluctuations of sediment accumulation rates in front of an Arctic delta in Greenland. Holocene 23, 860–868 (2013)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  19. Smith, R. W., Bianchi, T. S., Allison, M., Savage, C. & Galy, V. High rates of organic carbon burial in fjord sediments globally. Nat. Geosci. 8, 450–453 (2015)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  20. Forbes, D. L. State of the Arctic Coast 2010: Scientific Review and Outlook (Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, 2011)

  21. Hollesen, J., Matthiesen, H., Moller, A. B. & Elberling, B. Permafrost thawing in organic Arctic soils accelerated by ground heat production. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 574–578 (2015)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  22. Serreze, M. C. & Barry, R. G. Processes and impacts of Arctic amplification: a research synthesis. Global Planet. Change 77, 85–96 (2011)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  23. Cohen, J. et al. Recent Arctic amplification and extreme mid-latitude weather. Nat. Geosci. 7, 627–637 (2014)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. Elliott, T. in Sedimentary Environments and Facies (ed. Reading, H. G. ) Ch. 13, 113–154 (Blackwell Science, 1986)

  25. Fettweis, X. et al. Estimating the Greenland ice sheet surface mass balance contribution to future sea level rise using the regional atmospheric climate model MAR. Cryosphere 7, 469–489 (2013)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  26. Khan, S. A. et al. Geodetic measurements reveal similarities between post-Last Glacial Maximum and present-day mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet. Sci. Adv. 2, e1600931 (2016)

    Article  ADS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Bendixen, M. & Kroon, A. Conceptualizing delta forms and processes in Arctic coastal environments. Earth Surf. Proc. Land 42, 1227–1237 (2017)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  28. Forbes, D. L. & Hansom, J. D. Treatise on Estuarine and Coastal Science Vol. 3: Estuarine and Coastal Geology and Geomorphology, 245–283 (Elsevier, 2011

  29. Meyssignac, B., Fettweis, X., Chevrier, R. & Spada, G. Regional sea level changes for the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries induced by the regional variability in Greenland Ice Sheet surface mass loss. J. Clim. 30, 2011–2028 (2017)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  30. Syvitski, J. P. M. et al. Sinking deltas due to human activities. Nat. Geosci. 2, 681–686 (2009)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  31. Bjørk, A. A. et al. An aerial view of 80 years of climate-related glacier fluctuations in southeast Greenland. Nat. Geosci. 5, 427–432 (2012)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  32. ArcGIS Desktop: Release 10. https://esri.com (Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2011)

  33. Satterthwaite, F. E. An approximate distribution of estimates of variance components. Biometrics 2, 110–114 (1946)

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  34. Barnhart, K. R., Overeem, I. & Anderson, R. S. The effect of changing sea ice on the physical vulnerability of Arctic coasts. Cryosphere 8, 1777–1799 (2014)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  35. Cavalieri, D., Parkinson, P., Gloersen, P. & Zwally, H. J. Sea ice concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Passive Microwave Data, Version 1 (NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center, 1996); accessed April 2016

  36. Petrov, L. & Boy, J. P. Study of the atmospheric pressure loading signal in very long baseline interferometry observations. J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth 109, B03405 (2004)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  37. Dziewonski, A. M. & Anderson, D. L. Preliminary reference Earth model. Phys. Earth Planet. Inter. 25, 297–356 (1981)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  38. Ettema, J. et al. Climate of the Greenland ice sheet using a high-resolution climate model. Part 1: Evaluation. Cryosphere 4, 511–527 (2010)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  39. Howat, I. M., Negrete, A. & Smith, B. E. The Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) land classification and surface elevation data sets. Cryosphere 8, 1509–1518 (2014)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  40. Rastner, P. et al. The first complete inventory of the local glaciers and ice caps on Greenland. Cryosphere 6, 1483–1495 (2012)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  41. Brun, E., David, P., Sudul, M. & Brunot, G. A numerical model to simulate snow-cover stratigraphy for operational avalanche forecasting. J. Glaciol. 38, 13–22 (1992)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  42. Bamber, J. L., Layberry, R. L. & Gogineni, S. P. A new ice thickness and bed data set for the Greenland ice sheet. 1. Measurement, data reduction, and errors. J. Geophys. Res. D 106, 33773–33780 (2001)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  43. Shipley, B. Confirmatory path analysis in a generalized multilevel context. Ecology 90, 363–368 (2009)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  44. Grace, J. B. Structural Equation Modeling and Natural Systems (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006)

  45. Grace, J. B. et al. Guidelines for a graph-theoretic implementation of structural equation modeling. Ecosphere 3, art73 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Lefcheck, J. S. piecewiseSEM: piecewise structural equation modelling in R for ecology, evolution, and systematics. Methods Ecol. Evol. 7, 573–579 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Shipley, B. A new inferential test for path models based on directed acyclic graphs. Struct. Equ. Modeling 7, 206–218 (2000)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  48. Bollen, K. A., Kirby, J. B., Curran, P. J., Paxton, P. M. & Chen, F. Latent variable models under misspecification: two-stage least squares (2SLS) and maximum likelihood (ML) estimators. Sociol. Methods Res. 36, 48–86 (2007)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  49. Burnham, K. P. & Anderson, D. R. Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach (Springer Science & Business Media, 2002)

  50. Nakagawa, S. & Schielzeth, H. A general and simple method for obtaining R2 from generalized linear mixed-effects models. Methods Ecol. Evol. 4, 133–142 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Barton, K. MuMIn: Multi-Model Inference. R package version 1.15.6; https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=MuMIn (2016)

  52. Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. & Walker, S. lme4: linear mixed-effects models using ‘Eigen’ and S4. R package version 1.1-13; https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4 (2014)

  53. Lenth, R. V. Least-squares means: the R package lsmeans. J. Stat. Softw. 69, 1–33 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Pinheiro, J. & Bates, D. DebRoy, S. & Sarkar, D. nlme: linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. R package version 3.1-117; http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=nlme (2014)

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study would not have been possible without the aid of the Danish Geodata Agency (GST), who gave us access to the historical aerial photographs. The modern satellite imagery was obtained through the freely available online database Google Earth. M.B., A.K., A.W.-N. and B.E. acknowledge financial support from the Danish National Research Foundation (CENPERM DNRF100). L.L.I. was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (grant 0604-02230B). A.A.B. acknowledges support from the Danish Council for Independent Research, grant DFF-610800469, and from the Inge Lehmann Scholarship from the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters. I.O. received support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs (grant ARC-0909349) and INSTAAR. S.A.K. was funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (grant DFF-4181-00126). K.R.B. acknowledges support from the Annenberg Public Policy Center and NSF SI2-SSI Award 1450409. J.A. acknowledges the ClimateBasis programme of the Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring system (www.g-e-m.dk) and Asiaq Greenland Survey. K.L. was supported by Asiaq Greenland Survey.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Mette Bendixen and Lars Lønsmann Iversen: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Permafrost (CENPERM), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, DK-1350, Denmark

    Mette Bendixen, Bo Elberling, Andreas Westergaard-Nielsen & Aart Kroon

  2. Department of Biology, Freshwater Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, DK-2100, Denmark

    Lars Lønsmann Iversen

  3. Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, DK-1350, Denmark

    Anders Anker Bjørk

  4. Department of Earth System Science, University of California Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    Anders Anker Bjørk

  5. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, 91109, California, USA

    Anders Anker Bjørk

  6. Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    Irina Overeem

  7. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    Katy R. Barnhart

  8. DTU Space, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, DK-2800, Denmark

    Shfaqat Abbas Khan

  9. Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Glaciology, DK-1350, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jason E. Box

  10. Asiaq Greenland Survey, Postbox 1003, Nuuk, 3900, Greenland

    Jakob Abermann & Kirsty Langley

Authors
  1. Mette Bendixen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lars Lønsmann Iversen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Anders Anker Bjørk
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Bo Elberling
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Andreas Westergaard-Nielsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Irina Overeem
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Katy R. Barnhart
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Shfaqat Abbas Khan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Jason E. Box
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  10. Jakob Abermann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  11. Kirsty Langley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  12. Aart Kroon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

M.B. and L.L.I. designed the study, and, together with A.A.B., B.E. and A.K., framed the research questions. M.B. and A.A.B collected the data used in the photographic data analysis, and J.A. and K.L. assembled parts of this data. I.O. and K.R.B. analysed sea-ice data, A.W.-N. and J.E.B. analysed the data for the regional climate model, S.A.K. analysed isostasy data, and M.B. and L.L.I. analysed the data and wrote the manuscript with contributions and inputs from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mette Bendixen.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

Reviewer Information Nature thanks M. Fritz, W. Pollard and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Examples of the identification of the delta extent.

The land–water boundary is drawn where the high-water line (a) can be identified. Presence of snowcover (b) or icebergs (c) aids the identification process. Mouth bars (d) are included as part of the delta extent. All imagery provided by Google Earth.

Extended Data Figure 2 Meta-model showing hypothesized causal links from which a structural equation model was constructed.

Justification and argumentation of each path is given in the main text and Methods section. Solid boxes indicate factors from which two options for each variable were constructed, one representing initial values in the 1980s and one representing changes from 1980s to the 2010s. Dashed boxes indicate variables that were expected to have a confounding effect on delta changes, potentially obscuring our target hypotheses.

Extended Data Figure 3 Total effect of TDD on delta changes derived from the SEM.

The top-right insert indicates the direction of the pathways from TDD to delta changes in the structural equation model presented in Fig. 3. Green bars represent unique pathways via runoff; yellow bars represent unique pathways via sea-ice extent.

Extended Data Figure 4 Spatial distribution of runoff and thawing degree days (TDD).

a, Mean runoff; b, yearly change in runoff 1981–2014; c, mean TDD; d, yearly change in TDD from 1981–2014.

Extended Data Figure 5 Spatial distribution of open-water days.

a, Mean number of open-water days; b, yearly change in open-water days from 1981 to 2014.

Extended Data Figure 6 Total runoff from the studied delta catchments as a function of the ice coverage in the catchments.

The dotted line indicates mean trend from 0% to 100% ice coverage. There is a significant linear increase in the log total runoff in the 1980s when the percentage of ice bodies in the catchment increases: slope estimate β = 0.017 [0.006; 0.028], (mean [95% confidence limits]), P < 0.01.

Extended Data Table 1 Model variables
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Standardized partial effect sizes (and standard errors) and proposed interpretations
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Individual paths not included in the final structural equation
Full size table
Extended Data Table 4 AICc values of local submodels derived from the initial meta model
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Data

This file contains Supplementary Tables 1-2. (XLSX 23 kb)

PowerPoint slides

Source data

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bendixen, M., Lønsmann Iversen, L., Anker Bjørk, A. et al. Delta progradation in Greenland driven by increasing glacial mass loss. Nature 550, 101–104 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23873

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23873

This article is cited by

Comments

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing