The rapid retreat of glaciers pose health and economic risks to local communities
For decades, global warming has been causing accelerated melting of glaciers in mountains and the two poles. In the Arctic, this has caused marine terminating glaciers — whose boundaries end in the ocean — to retreat at a rapid pace in the 21st century.
This has caused coastlines and land to appear in these regions, which were historically always covered in ice. According to a study published in Nature, around 2,466 km of coastline has been uncovered between 2000 and 2020.
Titled ‘New coasts emerging from the retreat of Northern Hemisphere marine-terminating glaciers in the twenty-first century’, the study looks at how these coastlines came into being.
Around 66% of the new coastlines are to be found in mineral-rich Greenland, according to the study. It also found that these young paraglacial coastlines are highly dynamic, exhibiting high sediment fluxes and rapidly evolving landforms.
Dangers to local communities
The rapid retreat of marine-terminating glaciers can have adverse impacts on the local communities living in the Arctic region, according to the report. After the permafrost has retreated, the newly exposed coastlines are open to erosion, and powerful waves. The rapid deglaciation can trigger landslides, which can in turn, cause tsunamis to hit the coastlines — like the one occurring in June 2017, which caused substantial infrastructure damage and loss of life in Greenland, according to the report.
The retreat of permafrost also has an impact on tourism, the report found. The calving fronts of the tidewater glaciers — the point where glaciers break off into the ocean — are tourist hotspots. They are often susceptible to small tsunamis, while coasts where tourists can camp are threatened by iceberg roll waves, according to the report.
Indirectly, tourism may be affected as the icebergs now give way to rocky land surfaces, found the report.
However, there’s some potential economic benefit. The retreat of glaciers means increased deposits of sediment from the interaction of waves and exposed coastlines. According to the report, this helps a country like Greenland have greater access to sediment deposits, which can lead them to be economically independent.
Apart from Greenland, the Northern Canadian Arctic, Russian Arctic and Svalbard got around 218–240 km of new coastlines (9–10% each), while the rest is found in Alaska, Southern Canadian Arctic and Iceland.
According to the study, most of the newly formed coasts are in continuous permafrost zones, bedrocks, which have harsh climatic conditions. Here, the rate of erosion is much lower as the formation of new permafrost during cold months slows down the erosion process through ice cementation. But areas where there is a higher amount of sedimentary strata, they are the most prone to fast sediment generation and redistribution — erosion, the report stated.
The severity of the impacts of erosion and coastal wave movement will be determined by how fast the newly formed coastlines and landforms adapt to their new coastal environments, where they are not shrouded in the protective cloak of an icy glacier.
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