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New Research Turning Glacier Retreat into Climate Opportunity
Up to 83% of the world's glaciers are projected to vanish by 2100. Dr Jenna Sutherland, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and Environmental Science, is leading a new project to reframe this loss as an opportunity by studying how newly exposed land in Alaska can give rise to carbon-absorbing peatlands, improving global carbon models and informing future conservation policy.
The project, 'InsPIRE - Investigating Peatland Initiation in Retreating Glacier Environments', has received funding of £900,000 from NERC-NSF (the UK's Natural Environment Research Council and the United States' National Science Foundation) and is a three-year collaboration with Royal Holloway (University of London), University of Leeds, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the US Geological Survey.
Creating opportunity through crisis
According to the latest projections, 49-83% of the world's glaciers will disappear by 2100. Based on the current climate conditions, and due to the lag time of glacier response, a substantial part of this future ice loss is already committed. This means that even if temperatures were to stabilise or decrease, there will be inevitable glacier recession.
The retreat of glaciers exposes new land which can become the basis for complex and biodiverse ecosystems, such as peatlands, to evolve. Peatlands are organic-rich wetlands that naturally absorb carbon from the atmosphere over millennial timescales.
Peatlands are often coined as a nature-based solution to ongoing climate change because of their capacity to store carbon. Therefore, the formation of new peatlands in deglaciating environments represents the activation of a new carbon sink and could affect greenhouse gas budgets by sequestering carbon dioxide emissions.
The InsPIRE project aims to positively reframe the challenges of committed glacier retreat, using deglaciation in this context as an asset for climate change mitigation.
Newly-forming wetland and organic soil development after <10 years of glacier recession, Folgefonna National Park, Norway
Glaciers and Peatlands collide
InsPIRE is a unique interdisciplinary project that fuses the disciplines of glaciology and peatland science to determine how ongoing rapid glacier recession stimulates peatland initiation and carbon sequestration. We will undertake fieldwork in Alaska to collect peat cores for laboratory analysis which will tell us how old the peat is and how it has developed over time. These findings will be combined with state-of-the-art model simulations to predict the response and vulnerability of peatlands to future glacier recession.
The project is based in Alaska because that is the world region where glacier recession is largest and occurring the fastest. As such, Alaskan proglacial peatlands are likely representative of much larger landscapes that will deglaciate in the coming decades. The research will have important implications for understanding the development of carbon-rich landscapes not just in Alaska, but in other deglaciating regions around the world.
Influencing policy through practice
Ultimately, InsPIRE will quantify the influence of glacier-related peat patches in carbon cycling. Understanding the role of glacier recession on peatland carbon sequestration and storage will mark a step change in predictive capacity of carbon stocks.
We hope that our findings will be used to improve the accuracy of global carbon models and that governments will benefit when undertaking national carbon assessments. We recognise the need for effective conservation policies and management practices to preserve newly forming peatlands and influence ecosystem resilience in response to a warming climate.
Dr Jenna Sutherland
Jenna is a lecturer in Physical Geography and Environmental Science. Her expertise spans across glaciology, palaeo-environmental change, geomorphology and sedimentology. Jenna's specialist research focuses on the reconstruction of former glaciers through time.
