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An increasing body of work has shown the potential impacts of subglacial discharge from marine-terminating glaciers on the marine environment around Greenland. Upwelling of nutrients associated with rising buoyant plumes near the front of marine-terminating glaciers plays a key role in maintaining the high productivity of connected fjords. The response of protist communities to subglacial discharges into fjords nevertheless remains poorly understood. Here we show data of water properties, nutrients, and protist communities during two summers in 2018 and 2019 in a Greenlandic fjord system fed by marine-terminating glaciers. This study included the period of intense summer melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019. The data revealed high nutrient concentrations in 2019 that were attributed to intensified upwelling of nutrients and dissolved iron into the subsurface layer. The source of the iron and the nutrients was subglacial discharge and deep fjord water, respectively. Intense glacial discharges in 2019 mitigated nitrate and phosphate limitations of phytoplankton in the fjord and resulted in an increase of chlorophyll a in the subsurface layer and growth of large diatoms. Heterotrophic protists such as dinoflagellates, tintinnids, and nanoflagellates were more abundant in the summer of 2019. We concluded that nutrient upwelling by subglacial discharges was the major driver of the structure of lower trophic levels in fjord ecosystems. We hypothesize that the more intense melting of glaciers and related increase in subglacial discharge will enhance nutrient upwelling, and increased summer productivity in fjords until the glaciers retreat and terminate on land.

An increasing body of work has shown the potential impacts of subglacial discharge from marine-terminating glaciers on the marine environment around Greenland. Upwelling of nutrients associated with rising buoyant plumes near the front of marine-terminating glaciers plays a key role in maintaining the high productivity of connected fjords. The response of protist communities to subglacial discharges into fjords nevertheless remains poorly understood. Here we show data of water properties, nutrients, and protist communities during two summers in 2018 and 2019 in a Greenlandic fjord system fed by marine-terminating glaciers. This study included the period of intense summer melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019. The data revealed high nutrient concentrations in 2019 that were attributed to intensified upwelling of nutrients and dissolved iron into the subsurface layer. The source of the iron and the nutrients was subglacial discharge and deep fjord water, respectively. Intense glacial discharges in 2019 mitigated nitrate and phosphate limitations of phytoplankton in the fjord and resulted in an increase of chlorophyll a in the subsurface layer and growth of large diatoms. Heterotrophic protists such as dinoflagellates, tintinnids, and nanoflagellates were more abundant in the summer of 2019. We concluded that nutrient upwelling by subglacial discharges was the major driver of the structure of lower trophic levels in fjord ecosystems. We hypothesize that the more intense melting of glaciers and related increase in subglacial discharge will enhance nutrient upwelling, and increased summer productivity in fjords until the glaciers retreat and terminate on land.

Variations in the conditions of sea ice in the northern part of Baffin Bay and North Open Water polynya influence human activity in northwestern Greenland through oceanic circulation and heat balance between air and sea. To evaluate the impact of variations in sea ice conditions on the surrounding environment, it is important to understand the mechanism of sea ice variations over long periods. In this study, we estimated the age of the SIGMA‐A ice core collected northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet and researched the relationship between annual or seasonal deuterium excess (d‐excess) and seasonal sea ice concentration. We found that a temporal variation in the spring d‐excess in the ice core negatively correlated significantly with that of sea ice concentration in February–April in northern Baffin Bay from 1979–2005 (r = −0.61, p < 0.001). Using this relationship, we reconstructed the temporal variations in sea ice concentrations for 100 years from the ice core drilled in the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. The sea ice concentration in the early twentieth century was lower than that in the present. The decrease in sea ice concentration was consistent with analytical results for marine sediments obtained from Baffin Bay. We also suggested that the sea ice concentration was controlled by atmospheric conditions from the 1920s to 1940s based on examinations of correlations with the North Atlantic Oscillation index and air temperature in Ilulissat and by oceanographic conditions from 1945–1955, 1959–1969, and 1982–1992 based on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation index and meridional heat transport to western Greenland.