Dust particles from high latitudes have a potentially large local, regional, and global significance to climate and the environment as short-lived climate forcers, air pollutants, and nutrient sources. Identifying the locations of local dust sources and their emission, transport, and deposition processes is important for understanding the multiple impacts of high-latitude dust (HLD) on the Earth's systems. Here, we identify, describe, and quantify the source intensity (SI) values, which show the potential of soil surfaces for dust emission scaled to values 0 to 1 concerning globally best productive sources, using the Global Sand and Dust Storms Source Base Map (G-SDS-SBM). This includes 64 HLD sources in our collection for the northern (Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Sweden, and Russia) and southern (Antarctica and Patagonia) high latitudes. Activity from most of these HLD sources shows seasonal character. It is estimated that high-latitude land areas with higher (SI ≥0.5), very high (SI ≥0.7), and the highest potential (SI ≥0.9) for dust emission cover >1 670 000 km², >560 000 km², and >240 000 km², respectively. In the Arctic HLD region (≥60 ^∘ N), land area with SI ≥0.5 is 5.5 % (1 035 059 km²), area with SI ≥0.7 is 2.3 % (440 804 km²), and area with SI ≥0.9 is 1.1 % (208 701 km²). Minimum SI values in the northern HLD region are about 3 orders of magnitude smaller, indicating that the dust sources of this region greatly depend on weather conditions. Our spatial dust source distribution analysis modeling results showed evidence supporting a northern HLD belt, defined as the area north of 50^∘ N, with a “transitional HLD-source area” extending at latitudes 50–58^∘ N in Eurasia and 50–55^∘ N in Canada and a “cold HLD-source area” including areas north of 60^∘ N in Eurasia and north of 58^∘ N in Canada, with currently “no dust source” area between the HLD and low-latitude dust (LLD) dust belt, except for British Columbia. Using the global atmospheric transport model SILAM, we estimated that 1.0 % of the global dust emission originated from the high-latitude regions. About 57 % of the dust deposition in snow- and ice-covered Arctic regions was from HLD sources. In the southern HLD region, soil surface conditions are favorable for dust emission during the whole year. Climate change can cause a decrease in the duration of snow cover, retreat of glaciers, and an increase in drought, heatwave intensity, and frequency, leading to the increasing frequency of topsoil conditions favorable for dust emission, which increases the probability of dust storms. Our study provides a step forward to improve the representation of HLD in models and to monitor, quantify, and assess the environmental and climate significance of HLD.

Rapid warming of the Antarctic Peninsula is producing accelerated glacier mass loss and can be expected to have significant impacts on meltwater runoff regimes and proglacial fluvial activity. This study presents analysis of the hydrology and suspended sediment dynamics of two proglacial streams on James Ross Island, Antarctic Peninsula. Mean water discharge during 8 January 2015 to 18 February 2015 reached 0.19 m³ s⁻¹ and 0.06 m³ s⁻¹ for Bohemian Stream and Algal Stream, respectively, equivalent to specific runoff of 76 and 60 mm month⁻¹. The daily discharge regime strongly correlated with air and ground temperatures. The effect of global radiation on proglacial water discharge was found low to negligible. Suspended sediment concentrations of Bohemian Stream were very high (up to 2927 mg L⁻¹) due to aeolian supply and due to the high erodibility of local rocks. Total sediment yield (186 t km⁻² yr⁻¹) was high for (nearly) deglaciated catchments, but relatively low in comparison with streams draining more glaciated alpine and arctic catchments. The sediment provenance was mostly local Cretaceous marine and aeolian sediments; volcanic rocks are not an important source for suspended load. High Rb/Sr ratios for some samples suggested chemical weathering. Overall, this monitoring of proglacial hydrological and suspended sediment dynamics contributes to the dearth of such data from Antarctic environments and offers an insight to the nature of the proglacial fluvial activity, which is likely to be in a transient state with ongoing climate change.

The consequences of accelerating climatic warming on Arctic landscape evolution are far‐reaching. In Svalbard, glaciers are rapidly retreating after the Little Ice Age, which leads to exposing new coastal landscapes from marine‐terminating glaciers. Precise quantification of these changes was limited until the complete dataset of Svalbard glacier outlines from 1930's was made available. Here, we analyse the new Svalbard glacier change inventory data and demonstrate that glacier retreat led to a major shift from marine‐terminating towards land‐based glaciers in the last century. This retreat also led to the formation of 922.9 km of new coastline since 1930's creating pristine landscapes governed by paraglacial processes and sediment‐rich nearshore fjord environments. Recent palaeogeographical reconstructions suggest that such a mode of coastal evolution was dominant over the extended periods of the Holocene. Transitions from marine‐terminating to land‐based glaciers have significant implications for fjord circulation, biological production, the state of marine ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles between land and seas and the CO₂ budget in coastal waters.

Tidewater glaciers on the east coast of Svalbard were examined for surface elevation changes and retreat rate. An archival digital elevation model (DEM) from 1970 (generated from aerial images by the Norwegian Polar Institute) in combination with recent ArcticDEM were used to compare the surface elevation changes of eleven glaciers. This approach was complemented by a retreat rate estimation based on the analysis of Landsat and Sentinel-2 images. In total, four of the 11 tidewater glaciers became land-based due to the retreat of their termini. The remaining tidewater glaciers retreated at an average annual retreat rate of 48 m year⁻¹, and with range between 10–150 m year⁻¹. All the glaciers studied experienced thinning in their frontal zones with maximum surface elevation loss exceeding 100 m in the ablation areas of three glaciers. In contrast to the massive retreat and thinning of the frontal zones, a minor increase in ice thickness was recorded in some accumulation areas of the glaciers, exceeding 10 m on three glaciers. The change in glacier geometry suggests an important shift in glacier dynamics over the last 50 years, which very likely reflects the overall trend of increasing air temperatures. Such changes in glacier geometry are common at surging glaciers in their quiescent phase. Surging was detected on two glaciers studied, and was documented by the glacier front readvance and massive surface thinning in high elevated areas.