The Eurasian Arctic: Glacial landforms from the Younger Dryas (12.9–11.7 ka)

The Younger Dryas (12.9–11.7 ka) is considered the last cold period at the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene. The cooling was likely forced by a weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation by a freshwater release from the Laurentide ice sheet, but the glacial and geomorphological imprints across Europe and the High Arctic were very different. Distinct ice-marginal Younger Dryas landforms are found in Scandinavia and Central Europe, but in the Eurasian Arctic Younger Dryas ice-marginal deposits are sparse and this discrepancy has challenged the research community for decades. In recent years a number of ice-marginal deposits dated to the Younger Dryas chronozone have been identified on Svalbard and in the waters around, however their lack of synchronicity may indicate that these suggested readvances were driven by internal glacier dynamics rather than atmospheric forcing.