In the earlier literature there are two main groups of reconstructions of the Late Valdai glacial maximum in the Polar Urals. One group, for example Grosswald (1980), shows a Barents-Kara Ice Sheet which totally overruns the Polar Urals. The other group, for example Velichko and Faustova (1986), reconstructs an ice cap over the Urals with outlet or piedmont glaciers towards both sides. The QUEEN project concluded that both groups show too large Late Valdai glaciers and that the «Grosswald-type» glaciation is of pre-Mikulino age and the «Velichko-type» is of Middle or Early Valdai age (Svendsen et al, 2004). We have obtained a number of new dates supporting the QUEEN reconstruction. Here we will concentrate on ¹⁰Be-exposure dates indicating that glaciers in the Polar Urals were not much larger during the Late Valdai than at present.

In the Polar Urals, i.e. the Urals north of the Arctic Circle, the peaks reach 1300-1500 m a.s.l. and there are many glaciers today, although the largest is only 1.5 km long. We studied the Kuzty Glacier which is located (67°37'N, 65°35'E) some 20 km from the west front of the Urals, in an area where the mountain range is about 80 km wide. The glacier is sitting in a cirque with high and steep back walls which collect drifting snow during the winter and provide shadows in the summer. The glacier is presently only 0.5 km long, the front being situated at 529 m a.s.l. and the top is about 700 m a.s.l. There is a 60 m high, certainly ice-cored, «little-ice-age-type» moraine just outside the present ice margin. The glacier ends at the inner shore of a one km long lake occupying the valley floor.

On the down-valley shore of the lake there is an end moraine, which we name the Kuzty Lake Moraine. We obtained six ¹⁰Be exposure dates from boulders on the moraine ridge giving ages in the range 15-25 kyr BP. The weighted mean is 20±0.2 kyr BP. The conclusion is that during the Last Global Glacial Maximum (LGGM) the margin of the Kuzty glacier was located only one km beyond the present day margin.

Grosswald, M.G. (1980). Late Weichselian Ice Sheets of Northern Eurasia. Quaternary Research 13, 1-32.

Svendsen, J., Alexanderson, H., Astakhov, V., Demidov, I., Dowdeswell, J., Funder, S., Gataullin, V., Henriksen, M., Hjort, C, Houmark-Nielsen, M., Hubberten, H., Ingolfson, O., Jakobsson, M., Kjaer, K., Larsen, E., Lokrantz, H., Lunkka, J., Lysa, A., Mangerud, J., Matiouchkov, A., Murray, A., Moller, P., Niessen, F., Nikolskaya, O., Polyak, P., Saarnisto, M., Siegert, C, Siegert, M., Spielhagen, R., and Stein, R. (2004). Late Quaternary ice sheet history of Northern Eurasia. Quaternary Science Reviews 23, 1229-1271.

Velichko, A.A., and Faustova, M.A. (1986). Glaciations in the East European region of the USSR. Quaternary Science Reviews 5, 447-461.

Reference:

Mangerud J., Goss J., Matiouchkov A., Dolvik T. The Late Valdai (Weichselian) glacial maximum in the Polar Urals. Correlation of Pleistocene Events in the Russian North. International Workshop Abstracts. 4-6 December 2006. Saint-Petersburg, 2006, p. 60.