Introduction: Study Area and Its Environmental Recognition

Abstract

Sørkapp Land, and especially its western part, has been chosen as a destination of Jagiellonian University scientific expeditions since 1980. Geographic locations and natural environmental features make this isolated and mountainous region unique in the European Arctic. This southern Spitsbergen peninsula constitutes a land wedge (which narrows to the south) between different seas. Its eastern coast is affected by the cold sea current, whereas the western one is under influence of warm Atlantic water. These factors help generate a great deal of variety in the peninsula’s natural environment: from the western and southern lowlands overgrown by tundra with herds of reindeer to the glacial mountainous Arctic desert in the interior and east. Therefore, the peninsula is an excellent study area featuring all the relationships between the different components of the natural environment. They result in an unusually diverse, completely natural, and almost primeval landscape: glacial and periglacial, mountainous and low-lying, inland and coastal. These basic landscape types are internally differentiated: for example, fjord-type coastal landscape and open-ocean–type coastal landscape. Traces of the Pleistocene ice sheet may be discovered in the contemporary landscape. In addition, the reaction of this environment to climate warming can be readily noted due to relatively rapid climate fluctuations since the 1980s. New climate phenomena and associated trends can be easily observed in this area.