Meltwater temperature in streams draining Alpine glaciers

Alpine glaciers to disappear within decades ?

Evolution of rock glaciers and alpine glaciers: A model–model approach

The effects of horizontal stress transmission on the transient evolution of non-linear viscous bodies having aspects ratios similar to active alpine rock glaciers is investigated. This is done through a comparison between a shallow-ice model, which predicts material flux to be a local function of thickness and slope, and a finite-element model, which solves the full Stokes problem. For length-t...

Surface Velocity of Swiss Alpine Glaciers from Ers Sar Interferometry

Differential SAR interferograms were computed over the Swiss Alps with ERS-1/2 Tandem data acquired between 1995 and 2000 from ascending and descending orbits and use of an external Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Comparison with the Swiss glacier inventory 2000 shows that winter interferograms with one day time interval have a generally high degree of coherence and are straightforward to identi...

Rapid disintegration of Alpine glaciers observed with satellite data

Analyses of multispectral satellite data indicate accelerated glacier decline around the globe since the 1980s. By using digitized glacier outlines inferred from the 1973 inventory and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite data from 1985 to 1999, we obtained area changes of about 930 Alpine glaciers. The 18% area reduction as observed for the period 1985 to 1999 (−1.3% a�1) corresponds to a se...

Multi-date ERS tandem interferogram analysis: application to alpine glaciers

Temperate glaciers are an indicator of the local effects of global climate change. For economical and security reasons in the surrounding areas, the monitoring of those geophysical objects is being a necessity. SAR data are expected to provide dense measurements of physical parameters which are necessary to detect significant changes and to constrain glacier flow models. In this paper, five des...