Sixty years of glacial retreat behind Palmer Station, Antarctica

Abstract

Palmer Station is the smallest of three US scientific research bases in Antarctica. It is located on the south-western coast of Anvers Island, which is mostly glaciated, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, the temperature is considered mild (on average -4.7°C in winter and 1.9°C in summer from 1997 to 2023), but rapid warming is occurring despite high interannual variability (Jones et al. Reference Jones, Bromwich, Nicolas, Carrasco, Plavcová, Zou and Wang2019, Carrasco et al. Reference Carrasco, Bozkurt and Cordero2021). Palmer Station was constructed in 1968 to support scientific research, replacing ‘Old Palmer’ established in 1965 on Amsler Island (~2 km north-west of Palmer Station). The station was named after Nathaniel B. Palmer, an American sealer from Connecticut, who may have been the first person to see Antarctica during an exploratory voyage in 1820. Palmer Station is built on solid rock, and it has two main buildings and three smaller ones, two fuel tanks and a pier with a station maximum capacity of 44 people. In 1990, it was designated a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Baker, Fraser, Hofmann, Karl and Klinck1995), but it also supports various research efforts on climate, aeronomy, astrophysics, glaciology and marine and terrestrial organisms. Behind Palmer Station sits the Marr Ice Piedmont, which once covered most of the rocky terrain (Fig. 1). Here, we present for the first time a 60 year record of glacial retreat behind Palmer Station from 1963 to 2023 (some years shown in McClintock et al. Reference McClintock, Ducklow and Fraser2008, Groff et al. Reference Groff, Beilman, Yu, Ford and Xia2023).