Environmental Change in Iceland: Past and Present. An introduction

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of papers which explore the patterns of climatic and environmental changes in Iceland since the end of the last glaciation, through the ‘Little Ice Age’, to some of the processes modifying the present-day landscape. The book is particularly timely, for, while urgent interest is now being directed towards our understanding of global climate changes, Iceland is emerging as a crucial laboratory for advancing this understanding. Its position in the middle of the North Atlantic means that it is, and has been for most of its 3 million year Quaternary history, highly sensitive to north-south oscillations in the aerodynamic boundary that separates polar and tropical air streams. Hence, climatic variations and associated changes in oceanic circulation are, and have been, reflected in large-scale environmental changes in Iceland. The most dramatic example of this relationship was felt at the close of the last glaciation, when the marine polar front migrated thousands of kilometres between 13,000 and 11,000 BP, and again between 11,000 and 10,000 BP, associated with the complex climatic perturbations occurring during the final decay of the ice sheets in the northern hemisphere, and particularly those bounding the North Atlantic.