Proglacial landscape evolution across Greenland

Recent decades have witnessed profound environmental and landscape transformations across Greenland, largely attributable to ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Despite frequent references to these shifts in literature, the underpinnings and manifestations of such changes at a nationwide scale remain inadequately explored in academic discourse. Greenland, a critical component of global climate dynamics, presents a unique opportunity to explore and understand these rapid shifts in an environment sensitive to even the subtlest climatic perturbations.
This thesis provides a comprehensive investigation into Greenland's changing landscapes through three focused research chapters. The first chapter presents a long-term assessment of landcover changes, revealing a significant proliferation of vegetation indicative of Arctic Greening and permits a detailed assessment of the geomorphic and ecological processes driving the wider observed changes. The second chapter delves into the mass balance changes of Greenland’s peripheral glaciers and ice caps, documenting substantial ice loss and regional variations over several decades, contextualised further by considering terminus, behaviour and surface characteristics. The third chapter offers the first Greenland-wide analysis of sediment connectivity, identifying the impact of lakes on connectivity to coastlines by assessing and comparing structural and functional connectivity measures through the production of new hydrological and connectivity data.
The findings of this thesis are significant in their breadth and depth, providing a nuanced understanding of Greenland's environmental changes. The long-term assessments of landcover and glacier mass balance changes, coupled with the pioneering analysis of sediment connectivity collectively offer a detailed, multifaceted view of Greenland's transformation, underscoring the importance of such comprehensive studies in understanding and responding to Arctic climate change. A synthesised analysis of these three facets of environmental change provides a baseline assessment upon which future research into climate change in Greenland can be built.