Assessment of Morphology Changes of the End Moraine of the Werenskiold Glacier (SW Spitsbergen) Using Active and Passive Remote Sensing Techniques

Abstract

Wedel Jarlsberg Land in Svalbard is a region with a varied periglacial landscape. In the mountains and in the valleys, the climate is polar with permafrost. During the summer, the near-surface ground layer thaws. The Werenskiold Glacier, together with its end moraine, are located in the central part of this area. The rate of morphological changes observed within the moraine varies in time and space, and depends on the environmental conditions. This study investigates four periods of archival aerial photogrammetry measurements (1936, 1960, 1990, and 2011) performed for the end moraine of the glacier. The long-term analysis was also based on a direct GNSS RTK survey from 2015. Over a period of almost 80 years, more than 14 million m3 of rock and ice material disappeared from the end moraine of the glacier (an average of approximately 200 thousand m3/year). Analyses of the dynamic surface changes over one year (2015) were performed with the use of synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR). The time interval between images was in this case 12 days and covered (simultaneously in each scene) the entire investigated area. In this case, the analysis demonstrated that over a period of only 4 months, the moraine lost 200 thousand m3 of material (approximately two thousand m3/day), which is equivalent to the entire annual mass loss of the moraine.

Keywords

• InSAR
• photogrammetry
• GNSS
• Werenskiold Glacier
• Spitsbergen