Jökull - 01.01.2020, Qupperneq 77
Guðmundsson and Björnsson
Figure 1. a) Iceland and the location of Vatnajökull and Öræfajökul. b) Öræfajökull with outlet glaciers and
the location of Kvísker farm. c) The South and North Kvískerjajöklar glaciers (white area), the ice margins
at LIAmax (yellow line), in 1930 (green broken line) and 2011 (red broken line). Map based on data from
the National Land Survey of Iceland, the Icelandic Meteorological Office and the Institute of Earth Sciences,
University of Iceland. – a) Ísland, Vatnajökull. b) Öræfajökull, Kvískerjajöklar innan rauðs ramma. c) Kví-
skerjajöklar, hámarksstaða á litlu ísöld (gul lína), um 1930 (græn brotin lína) og 2011 (rauð brotin lína).
is based on written reports on weather, sea ice and
glacier variations (Annálar 1400–1900; Thoroddsen,
1911, 1916–1917; Thorarinsson, 1939, 1943, 1956;
Grove, 1988; Ogilvie and Jónsson, 2000; Björnsson,
2017; Miles et al., 2020). The deteriorating climate in
the late Middle Ages led to a general glacier advance
and the major outlet glaciers in Iceland reached their
LIAmax extent at the end of the extremely cold pe-
riod of the 1880s; soon thereafter they started on a re-
treat which has continued to the present day, with tem-
porary short advances or near standstill in the 1970s
to the early 1990s (Thorarinsson, 1939, 1943, 1956;
Eyþórsson, 1981; Sigurðsson, 1998; Jóhannesson and
Sigurðsson, 1998; Magnússon, 1955; Ólafsson and
Pálsson, 1978; Pálsson, 1945; Björnsson, 1998; Guð-
mundsson, 1998; Bradwell et al., 2008; Björnsson
and Pálsson, 2008; Björnsson, 2009, 2017; Chenet et
al., 2010; Hannesdóttir, 2014; Evans, 2016; Evans et
al., 2017). However, the glacier changes were vari-
able in detail during the LIA. Some of the steepest
outlets may have reached their largest extent near the
middle of the 18th century and alternately retreated
and advanced until the end of the 19th century. For in-
stance, in 1894, Thoroddsen (1911) noted two series
of moraines in front of the terminus of Morsárjökull,
implicating the outlet had reached maximum extent
74 JÖKULL No. 70, 2020