Did Scandinavian glaciers survive the warmer conditions of the early Holocene? Ice thickness measurements, proglacial lake sediment, and cosmogenic nuclides in bedrock alongside Riukojietna, a small low-elevation ice cap in northern Sweden, all combine to constrain a glacier advance and retreat history since 9.8 thousand years ago. Riukojietna was small but persisted through the early Holocene, illustrating that other but higher-elevation valley glaciers in the region may also have done so.

Carbon-14 produced in quartz (half-life of 5700 ± 30 years) provides a new tool to date exposure of bedrock surfaces. Samples from 10 exposed bedrock surfaces in east-central Sweden give dates consistent with the timing of both landscape emergence above sea level through postglacial rebound and retreat of the last ice sheet shown in previous reconstructions. Carbon-14 in quartz can therefore be used for dating in landscapes where isotopes with longer half-lives give complex exposure results.

In situ ¹⁴C’s short half-life (5.7 kyr) is unique among cosmogenic nuclides, making it sensitive to complex exposure and burial histories since 25 ka. Current extraction methods focus on quartz, but the ability to extract it from other minerals would expand applications. We developed MATLAB® scripts to calculate in situ ¹⁴C production rates from a broad range of mineral compositions. Results confirm O, Si, Al, and Mg as key targets but also find significant production from Na for the first time.

Mountains higher than the ice surface are sampled to know when the ice reached the sampled elevation, which can be used to guide numerical models. This is important to understand how much ice will be lost by ice sheets in the future. We use a simple model to understand how ice flow around mountains affects the ice surface topography and show how much this influences results from field samples. We also show that models need a finer resolution over mountainous areas to better match field samples.