Glacier Change at Suntar-Khayata Mountains in North-East Siberia

Abstract:

Due to the enhanced warming in the Arctic Regions owing to the sea-ice decrease and others processes, as a part of the global warming, other snow and ice such as glaciers are also decreasing (SWIPA, 2011) and melting region of Greenland are said to have increased in 2012. It is very important to know the present actual condition and the speed of the changes. Research group in Japan and Russia, started to look into the present state of the glaciers of the North-East Siberia which is one of the blank area in the Arctic Region. The glaciated area in the Sunta-Khayata Mountain Range, which exist at northest Siberia, between the てぇcities of Magadan in the Pacific Coast and Oimyakon. The glaciated area is said to be 156 km2 in 1945 and decreased to 162 km2 in 2002/2003 (SWIPA, 2011). This change should be accelerated during the recent ten years, due to the strong warming occurring in the 2000s. In-situ research in this region has been made in IGY period (1957～1959) by Russian Groups、and after that, in year 2000 and 2004～2005 by joint Russian and Japanese Groups. Since old information exists in this region, this is a good area for studying cryospheric changes due to the recent strong warming. A project started in 2011 to obtain glacier basic information and study their changes, and will look into the future variability applying glacier models. Also, mountain environment such as permafrost condition, geomorphology were surveyed. Reconnaissance started in 2011, and field surveys were done in three summers (2012 to 2014). Glacier mass, mass balance changes, glacier-climate relation and past glacier variability is discussed based on glacier measurement, surface mass balance measurement, in-situ climate observation and moraine dating. This is a project between Cold Region Program of JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan), GRENE Project of NIPR (Tokyo, Japan) and Melinikov Permafrost Institute (Yakutsk, Russia).