Glacial geomorphology of the Republic of Karelia, northwest Russia: the Younger Dryas-early Holocene ice marginal zone

Abstract

At present, there remains uncertainty surrounding the Younger Dryas-early Holocene glacial history of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet in northwest Arctic Russia. This stems from a lack of high-resolution ice sheet-scale geomorphological data in the region. To address this, this paper presents 15,355 meltwater and morainic landforms in a new large-scale, glacial geomorphological map of the Younger Dryas-early Holocene ice marginal zone in the Republic of Karelia, northwest Russia. Individual landforms were mapped from relief-shaded renditions of the 2 m resolution ArcticDEM alongside 1 m resolution Esri World Imagery data in a Geographic Information System (GIS). The map, which is presented at a scale of 1: 675,000, will form the basis of a palaeo-glaciological reconstruction of northwest Russia that will inform on ice sheet dynamics–at both a regional- and ice sheet-scale–and provide an important framework through which numerical ice sheet models can be constrained.