Not gone with the wind: or 10,000 years of storminess revealed in the coastal Arctic lake sediments

A Polish-Norwegian team of scientists has shed new insights into historical storm patterns in the European Arctic during the Holocene. Analysing a sediment sequence from Lake Steinbruvatnet, a small lake located on Sørkappøya Island at the southern tip of Svalbard, they reconstructed nearly 10,000 years of storm history in the region. Their high-resolution study utilized advanced geochemical and sedimentological tools, including XRF scanning and Computed Tomography (CT), conducted at EARTHLAB in Bergen, Norway – one of Europe’s most advanced Earth Science laboratories. Their findings were recently published in Nature Communications (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53875-1) Mgr Zofia Stachowska

Zofia Stachowska, MSc and a PhD student at the Doctoral School of the University of Szczecin and a member of the “ASPIRE” project (Arctic storm impacts recorded in beach-ridges and lake archives: scenarios for less icy future) team, says that the study has brought some surprising results. Notably, it has revealed that cooler periods were linked to more intense storminess, challenging the widely accepted assumption that warmer periods are associated with more dynamic weather conditions. And that is still not all – the reconstruction revealed a 1,500-year cyclicity in the storminess, also observed in other North Atlantic climate records, which Dr. Willem van der Bilt, the project’s Norwegian partner from the University of Bergen, has described it as “the heartbeat of the region’s climate system”. Moreover, the team shows that changes in the intensity of the two dominant wind systems – the polar Easterlies and the Westerlies were synchronised.

Dr. van der Bilt underlines the key role of sedimentary archives in verifying models that predict future climate phenomena and associated geohazards. He highlights that looking into the past provides scientists with a more complete picture of climate dynamics, particularly in the polar regions. Dr. van der Bilt believes that polar paleotempestology – the study of historical changes in storm activity and wind strength has a potential to improve our ability to predict the range and impact of such events in the near future. Prof. Mateusz Strzelecki from the Alfred Jahn Cold Regions Research Centre at the University of Wrocław emphasises the importance of this research project for improving our understanding of coastal evolution in this part of the Arctic: “until now, we had practically no data on how storms influenced the long-term evolution of Svalbard’s coastal environments”. Dr Willem van der Bilt Prof. Strzelecki believes that the project provides valuable insights into how Svalbard’s coasts adapted to changes in storminess. “Now that we understand the storm conditions under Svalbard’s beaches formed, we can provide better explanations of their evolution along with changes in sea level, sea ice, and sediment supply throughout the Holocene. Recent decades have brought considerable progress in our understanding Arctic coastal evolution in Siberia, the Yukon Peninsula, Alaska and Greenland. We believe that our work opens a new chapter in the history of research on Svalbard’s coastal evolution, and this is an exciting time for us all”, he adds.

“ASPIRE”, the research project behind the recent publication in Nature Communications” was funded by the National Science Centre (NCN) in Poland and led by Prof. Mateusz C. Strzelecki. Project Co-PI - Dr. Willem van der Bilt was also supported by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation grant. Dr. van der Bilt and Prof. Strzelecki are convinced that these groundbreaking results will lay the groundwork for future interdisciplinary paleotempestological research in the Barents Sea – the fastest warming region of the Arctic. They also see this as an excellent opportunity to tighten future Polish-Norwegian scientific cooperation.

Popular science outline: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/wind-blown-lake-mud-records-10-000-years-of-arctic-storminess

The coast of the island of Sørkappøya, S Svalbard, photo by Mateusz Strzelecki

Coastal lakes and lagoons on Sørkappøya – a unique archive of Arctic storminess, photo by Rolf Stange

Lake Steinbruvatnet – the origin site of our incredibly precious sediment core, photo by Willem van der Bilt