Abstract

Huge quantities of little valley ice sheets on Svalbard were thicker and more broad during the Little Ice Age (LIA), exhibited by unmistakable ice-cored moraines as much as a few kilometers past present-day edges. Most of these ice sheets have since encountered an extensive stretch of emphatically bad mass equilibrium during the twentieth century and are presently to a great extent stuck to their beds, showing they are probably going to have gone through a warm change from a polythermal to a cool based system. We present proof for such a switch by reproducing the previous stream elements and warm system of Tell Breen, a little cool based valley icy mass in focal Spitsbergen, in light of its basal succession and glaciological structures. Inside the basal grouping, the basic grid upheld diamict is deciphered as immersed subglacial footing till which has frozen at the bed, showing that the warm switch has brought about a discontinuance of subglacial silt misshaping because of freezing of the previous distorting layer.

Keywords: Arctic glaciology; Ice dynamics; Structural glaciology