Author: Michael Zemp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783855432615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
"Information about ongoing glacier changes was already being collected internationally as early as 1894. In the beginning, the focus was on compiling and publishing findings relating to glacier front variations, in the hope that long-term glacier monitoring would give insight into processes affecting the formation of the Ice Ages. Since then, the datasets and goals of international glacier monitoring have evolved and multiplied. Glaciers have become the icon of global warming, which has resulted in an increasing demand for data and information about their global and regional distribution and changes. Modern monitoring strategies have been designed to provide quantitative and understandable information in connection with questions about process understanding, change detection, model calibration and validation, as well as environmental impacts. As such, monitoring can be regarded as the data backbone for scientific research. However, in spite of the early start of internationally coordinated glacier monitoring and its contemporaneous evolution within the glaciological sciences, the relevance of long-term glacier monitoring has not yet been fully acknowledged by the scientific community and funding agencies. It is to fill this gap in understanding that the present work undertakes to demonstrate the relevance of glacier monitoring, and its ability to complement scientific studies, on a local, mountain, and global scale. Based on 14 publications with essential contributions by this author, this work provides an overview of the historical background and present context of glacier monitoring, and the relevant organizations, strategies, and datasets. In the thematic main part, the methodological implementation of these concepts is presented, including exemplary results at different spatio-temporal scales integrating in-situ and remote sensing measurements, and numerical modeling. This is followed by a first effort to measure the relevance of internationally coordinated glacier monitoring. In this way, the present work provides a comprehensive summary of monitoring concepts, the results from recent distribution and glacier change studies, and an outlook on the corresponding key tasks for the coming decade(s). The internationally coordinated monitoring efforts over more than a century have resulted in an unprecedented dataset of information about spatial glacier distribution and changes over time. These datasets are readily available and include reconstructed glacier changes extending back into the Little Ice Age and the Holocene, direct observations of annual front variation dating back to the late 19th century, six decades of annual and seasonal mass balance measurements, and a preliminary world glacier inventory for the 1970s, based mainly on aerial photographs and maps, with detailed information on more than 100,000 glaciers. This latter inventory task continues through the present day, now based mainly on satellite images. These datasets document that the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraines is a worldwide and centennial trend showing increasing ice loss since the mid 1980s, with intermittent periods of glacier re-advances at regional and decadal scale. When looking at individual fluctuation series, one finds a high rate of variability and sometimes widely contrasting behavior of neighboring ice bodies. Reviewing the extensive literature available on process understanding and numerical modeling of glaciers, it becomes evident that, given current climate change scenarios, the ongoing trend of worldwide and rapid ice loss may lead to the deglaciation of large sectors of many mountain ranges during the present century. This will most probably trigger secondary impacts on global sea level rise, regional hydrologic regimes and landscape evolution, and local hazard situations beyond known historic and Holocene experience. Such rapid environmental changes require that the international glacier monitoring efforts make use of swiftly developing new technologies, such as remote sensing and geo-informatics, and relate them to the more traditional field observations, in order to tackle the challenges of the 21st century in a more effective way." Résumé de l'auteur.
Author: Mauri Pelto
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119068118
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Glaciers are considered a key and an iconic indicator of climate change. The World Glacier Monitoring Service has noted that global alpine balance has been negative for 35 consecutive years. This highlights the dire future that alpine glaciers face. The goal of this volume is to tell the story, glacier by glacier, of response to climate change from 1984-2015. Of the 165 glaciers examined in 10 different alpine regions, 162 have retreated significantly. It is evident that the changes are significant, not happening at a "glacial" pace, and are profoundly affecting alpine regions. There is a consistent result that reverberates from mountain range to mountain range, which emphasizes that although regional glacier and climate feedbacks differ, global changes are driving the response. This book considers ten different glaciated regions around the individual glaciers, and offers a different tune to the same chorus of glacier volume loss in the face of climate change.
Author: Petri Pellikka
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0203851307
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Glaciers and ice sheets have been melting significantly during recent decades, posing environmental threats at local, regional and global scales. Changes in glaciers are one of the clearest indicators of alterations in regional climate, since they are governed by changes in accumulation (from snowfall) and ablation (by melting of ice). Glacier chan
Author: John F. Shroder
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0444637885
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Mountain Ice and Water: Investigations of the Hydrologic Cycle in Alpine Environments is a new volume of papers reviewed and edited by John Shroder, Emeritus Professor of Geography and Geology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA, and Greg Greenwood, Director of the Mountain Research Initiative from Bern, Switzerland. Chapters in this book were derived from research papers that were delivered at the Perth III Conference on Mountains of our Future Earth in Scotland in October 2015. The conference was established to help develop the knowledge necessary to respond effectively to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change and to support transformations toward global sustainability in the coming decades. To this end, the conference and book have investigated the future situation in mountains from three points of view. (1) Dynamic Planet: Observing, explaining, understanding, and projecting Earth, environmental, and societal system trends, drivers, and processes and their interactions to anticipate global thresholds and risks, (2) Global Sustainable Development: Increasing knowledge for sustainable, secure, and fair stewardship of biodiversity, food, water, health, energy, materials, and other ecosystem services, and (3) Transformations towards Sustainability: Understanding transformation processes and options, assessing how these relate to human values, emerging technologies and social and economic development pathways, and evaluating strategies for governing and managing the global environment across sectors and scales. Derived from research papers delivered at the Perth III Conference on Mountains of our Future Earth in Scotland in October 2015 Helps develop the knowledge necessary for responding effectively in coming decades to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change and tactics for global sustainability Provides the research community working on global change in mountains with a broader framework established by the Future Earth initiative
Author: Danilo Godone
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 9535135430
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
Glaciers have always played an important role in human history, and currently, they are carefully observed as climate change sentinels. Glacier melt rate is increasing, and its mass balance is continuously negative. This issue deserves accurate and in-depth studies in order to, adequately, monitor its state. This circumstance in fact endangers the water supply, affecting human settlements but also creating new environments allowing the colonization by pioneer communities and the formation of new landscapes. This book is subdivided into two main sections in order to deal with the two topics of worldwide research on glaciers and ecology in glacial environments. In the first one "Glaciers in the World," several reviews and studies are collected. It is an overview of glaciers, their state, and research carried out in different continents and contexts. The second section "Glacial Ecosystems" focuses, on the other hand, on glacier environments and ecological researches.
Author: Uli M. Huber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140203508X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 642
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Book Description
This book gives an overview of the state of research in fields pertaining to the detection, understanding and prediction of global change impacts in mountain regions. More than sixty contributions from paleoclimatology, cryospheric research, hydrology, ecology, and development studies are compiled in this volume, each with an outlook on future research directions. The book will interest meteorologists, geologists, botanists and climatologists.
Author: Michael Demuth
Publisher: Rocky Mountain Books Ltd
ISBN: 1926855736
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies. Becoming Water takes the reader on a tour of Canada’s glaciers, describing the stories they tell and educating the reader about how glaciers came to be, how they work and what their future holds in our warming world. By visiting Canada’s high and low Arctic, and the mountain West, the reader will learn how varied and complex our glaciers really are, how they are measured and how they figure into the national and global story of inevitable change. The reader will learn to think like a scientist, in particular how to look at climate-related data that contains cycles, trends and shifts, and then ponder what questions to ask in the face of our dramatically changing environment. This book encourages Canadians to explore upstream from ourselves, learning about our origins and how climate change and encroaching human settlement are drastically impacting our glaciers and therefore the natural and human landscapes that lie below—and are dependent upon—them.
Author: Michael Zemp
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889665798
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
Author: Jeffrey S. Kargel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3540798188
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 936
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Book Description
An international team of over 150 experts provide up-to-date satellite imaging and quantitative analysis of the state and dynamics of the glaciers around the world, and they provide an in-depth review of analysis methodologies. Includes an e-published supplement. Global Land Ice Measurements from Space - Satellite Multispectral Imaging of Glaciers (GLIMS book for short) is the leading state-of-the-art technical and interpretive presentation of satellite image data and analysis of the changing state of the world's glaciers. The book is the most definitive, comprehensive product of a global glacier remote sensing consortium, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS, http://www.glims.org). With 33 chapters and a companion e-supplement, the world's foremost experts in satellite image analysis of glaciers analyze the current state and recent and possible future changes of glaciers across the globe and interpret these findings for policy planners. Climate change is with us for some time to come, and its impacts are being felt by the world's population. The GLIMS Book, to be released about the same time as the IPCC's 5th Assessment report on global climate warming, buttresses and adds rich details and authority to the global change community's understanding of climate change impacts on the cryosphere. This will be a definitive and technically complete reference for experts and students examining the responses of glaciers to climate change. World experts demonstrate that glaciers are changing in response to the ongoing climatic upheaval in addition to other factors that pertain to the circumstances of individual glaciers. The global mosaic of glacier changes is documented by quantitative analyses and are placed into a perspective of causative factors. Starting with a Foreword, Preface, and Introduction, the GLIMS book gives the rationale for and history of glacier monitoring and satellite data analysis. It includes a comprehensive set of six "how-to" methodology chapters, twenty-five chapters detailing regional glacier state and dynamical changes, and an in-depth summary and interpretation chapter placing the observed glacier changes into a global context of the coupled atmosphere-land-ocean system. An accompanying e-supplement will include oversize imagery and other other highly visual renderings of scientific data.
Author: Michael C. Kruk
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2832515231
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
