Arctic Coastal Bluff Erosion on Disko Island, Greenland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The coasts of Greenland mostly consist of hard rock with relatively small rates of erosion. However, isostatic uplift following the retreat of Holocene ice sheets is creating soft sediment bluffs consisting of deltas or beach ridges. Hitherto, very little has been known about the rates and processes of soft sediment bluff erosion along the coast of Greenland. Here, we investigate a bluff section at the south coast of Disko Island in western Greenland. The height of the bluff ranges from one to 30 m along a three km long section of the coast. The bluff consists of a heterogeneous matrix of hard rock outcrops with pockets of coarse clastic sediments in between, overlain by parallel beach ridges with discontinuous permafrost. Sea ice along the coast limits wave activity between December and May. A series of oblique aerial images from July 2019 and July 2021 was obtained to create Structure from Motion Multi-View Stereo (SfM MVS) point clouds. Changes were detected by multi-scale model-to-model cloud comparison (M3C2). Climate data from the nearby town of Qeqertarsuaq were used to identify precipitation events to estimate erosion events at the bluff. This data were utilized in conjunction with satellite derived bathymetry and wave data to estimate wave run-up and erosion at the coastline for a series of hydrodynamic conditions. We find the absence of soil on top of the uplifted beach ridges strongly influences runoff patterns. Without the water retention capability of the soil, water directly infiltrates into the soft sediments, or runs off the surface of the hard rock areas. This leads to an accumulation of water in the soft sediment pockets and gullies, making them especially vulnerable to erosion. The sedimentary bluff is eroding by two coupled processes: (i) Precipitation-driven surface runoff downslope the bluff face and (ii) wave-driven erosion at the bluff base of sediment that is delivered by the surface runoff. Typical erosion rates are up to half a meter per year. Longer ice-free periods with extended wave action should further increase coastal bluff erosion rates in Greenland in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".