GLACIERS IN THE HIGH ARCTIC AND RECENT ENVIRONMENTAL-CHANGE

High Arctic climate change over the last few hundred years includes th e relatively cool Little Ice Age (LIA), followed by warming over the l ast hundred years or so. Meteorological data from the Eurasian High Ar ctic (Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya) and Canadian High Arctic islands are scarce before the mid-20th century, but longer reco rds from Svalbard and Greenland show warming from about 1910-1920. Log s of Royal Navy ships in the Canadian Northwest Passage in the 1850s i ndicate temperatures cooler by 1-2.5 degrees C during the LIA. Other e vidence of recent trends in High Arctic temperatures and precipitation is derived from ice cores, which show cooler temperatures (by 2-3 deg rees C) for several hundred years before 1900, with high interdecadal variability. The proportion of melt layers in ice cores has also risen over the last 70-130 years, indicating warming. There is widespread g eological evidence of glacier retreat in the High Arctic since about t he turn of the century linked to the end of the LIA. An exception is t he rapid advance of some surge-type ice masses Mass balance measuremen ts on ice caps in Arctic Canada, Svalbard and Severnaya Zemlya since 1 950 show either negative or near-zero net balances, suggesting glacier response to recent climate warming. Glacier-climate links are modelle d using an energy balance approach to predict glacier response to poss ible future climate warming, and cooler LIA temperatures. For Spitsber gen glaciers, a negative shift in mass balance of about 0.5 m a(-1) is predicted for a 1 degrees C warming. A cooling of about 0.6 degrees C , or a 23% precipitation increase, would produce an approximately zero net mass balance. A 'greenhouse-induced' warming of 1 degrees C in th e High Arctic is predicted to produce a global sea-level rise of 0.063 mm a(-1) from ice cap melting.