Rapid shredding of the subglacial sediment export signal by proglacial forefields

Alpine glaciers have been rapidly retreating and at increasing rates in recent decades due to climate warming. As a consequence, large amounts of suspended- and bed-load flux are being released to proglacial environments, such as proglacial forefields. These regions are among the most unstable geomorphic systems of the Earth because they rapidly respond to changing discharge and sediment conditions. Given this, it might be hypothesized that their intense morphodynamic activity, being a complex and non-linear process, could “shred” the sediment transport signal itself, and especially that related to subglacial sediment export.

To date, our knowledge on subglacial sediment export by subglacial streams is essentially dominated by suspended sediment dynamics recorded in front of shrinking glaciers because of the limitations in measuring bedload transport. The latter is usually monitored far downstream from glacier termini by permanent stations (e.g. water intakes, geophone systems) leaving major uncertainties in the absolute amounts and temporal patterns of transport in both glacial and proglacial environments, as well as the relative importance compared to suspended sediment in case of morphodynamic filtering. Thus, the aim of this project was to investigate the evolution of the both suspended- and bedload subglacial export signals within the proglacial forefield to quantify the extent and the timescale over which proglacial morphodynamics filter them.

This work focuses on a large Alpine glacial forefield, almost 2 km in length, that has formed since the early 1980s at the Glacier d’Otemma (southern-western Swiss Alps, Valais). Data were collected over two entire melt seasons (June-September 2020 and 2021) experiencing different climatic conditions, the first year warm and relatively dry and the second cold and relatively wet. Suspended transport was recorded using conventional turbidity-suspended sediment concentration relationship, bedload transport was monitored seismically, while the morphodynamic filtering was determined using signal post-processing techniques. At present, there are no studies combining continuous measurements of both suspended- and bed-loads in such environments.

Results show that the signal of subglacial bedload export, unlike suspended load export, is rapidly shredded by proglacial stream morphodynamics, which we show is due to a particle-size dependent autogenic sorting of sediment transport at both daily and seasonal time-scales. The result is that over very short distances, the signal of subglacial bedload sediment export is lost and replaced by a signal dominated by morphodynamic reworking of the proglacial braidplain. The suspended signal is less impeded but significant floodplain storage and release of suspended sediment was observed. These results question the reliability of current inferences of glacial erosion rates from sediment transport rates often measured some way downstream of glacier margins.