极地环境与全球变化安徽省重点实验室报告会

Svalbard is located in the outer part of Barents Sea shelf, ca. 800 km from the northern extents of European continent. During the Pleistocene it was massively glaciated in consecutive ice-sheet transgressions, but their reconstruction is limited due to very poor evidences on land and difficulties in acquiring marine bottom sediments from before last glacial advance. In Billefjorden (central Spitsbergen), sedimentary sequences remained, allowing the insight into glacial and marine history of the area, significantly earlier than based on other existing archives. They combine terrestrial record of glaciations and traces of glacioisostatic movements of Saale and Weichsel stages. Towards present the evidences are either approximated by sedimentary and geomorphological features and since the Little Ice Age, based on environmental observations and direct measurements of glaciers extent.