Recent changes in glacier velocities and thinning at Novaya Zemlya

Flow velocities are generated by feature tracking on optical and radar image pairs. Marine-terminating glaciers along the Barents Sea coast have the highest frontal velocities of any glaciers on NVZ. Our surface velocity measurements constrain the calving flux at the two fastest-retreating glaciers, Inostrantseva (INO) and Vil'kitskogo (VIS), which are both on the Barents Sea coast. We find that the calving flux is high enough to drive frontal thinning and retreat at those two glaciers. Summer terminus speeds at Inostrantseva Glacier have accelerated from a 2006 maximum of 3 m day− 1 to a 2012 maximum of 9 to 10 m day− 1 and the front has retreated by more than 3 km between 2006/06/27 and 2013/08/17.