Shifting shorelines in a warming world: Deciphering coastal landscape sensitivity to climate change from the Paleocene Greenhouse of Arctic Svalbard

Predicting the impact of the present-day global warming on the world’s shorelines is crucial for mapping future coastal hazards. Coastal environments are particularly sensitive to climate change, because the balance in the accumulation, distribution and erosion of nearshore sediments is controlled by various climate-forced parameters, including global eustatic sea level, regional source-to-sink routes, and local storms and floods. Simultaneously, coastal geomorphology and shoreline position are closely linked with local hydrology and vegetation distribution, such as peatlands, which are extremely sensitive to climate, humidity and precipitation. As a result, climate change may cause widespread coastal response in the form of shifting shoreline positions, changing landscapes and habitat modification of ecosystems. However, it remains uncertain how, and how much, coastal environments change with changing climate and temperatures in both time and space. Since the impact of global warming on the world’s shorelines remains to be seen, analyses of ancient sedimentary archives are vital for understanding climate-forced coastal changes.

The Paleocene sedimentary succession in Arctic Svalbard is ideal for this purpose, because it: (i) forms a paralic sedimentary archive that was deposited in climates with characterized by atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and global temperatures higher than, but comparable to, the present day; (ii) contains abundant fossil peat (coal) seams; (iii) represents various coastal landscapes, including beaches, lagoons, barriers, estuaries, deltas, wetlands and forests; (iv) records frequent shifts in relative sea level and corresponding nearshore hydrology and peat accumulation; and (v) was deposited near the pole, where signals of climate change are amplified.

We present detailed facies-architectural reconstruction of the Paleocene strata in Svalbard, which delineates shoreline shifts controlled by sea-level changes, and we evaluate how coastal processes, environments and landscapes shift in response to temperature evolution, and aridity and humidity trends. Furthermore, we identify changes in shoreline geomorphology in response to shifts in paleotopography and vegetation build-up.