2024/02/23 by Holly Wytiahlowsky, Marie E. Busfield, Adam Hepburn +1 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Cryospheric studies and observations #Climate change and permafrost #Arctic and Antarctic ice dynamics
paper · doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2024.109113
openalex publication_date 2024/02/23 · openalex created_date 2024/02/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The European Alps are rapidly losing glacier mass due to climatic warming and are anticipated to be largely ice-free by the year 2100. Long-term glacier monitoring in the Alps provides a record of anthropogenically-driven climate change since the Little Ice Age maximum in ~1850. Understanding these long-term glacier changes provides a basis for mitigating hazards (e.g., mass movements) associated with a transition to a paraglacial environment and for predicting future scenarios. Here, we present a post-Little Ice Age-maximum record of glacial landscape changes in the Upper Zemmgrund, Austria, utilising a multi-method framework integrating multi-decadal geomorphological mapping, historical imagery and remote sensing of glacier change. This study contributes a high-resolution, quantifiable record of the transition from a glacial to paraglacial landscape. We find that individual glacier response to climatic change varies within the Upper Zemmgrund, attributed to glacier characteristics such as hypsometry and size. Nonetheless, all glaciers show signs of growing instability such as an increase in crevasses and the collapse of circular tension structures, which have dammed meltwater at the terminus of one glacier, posing a substantial hazard to downstream communities. Future glacier disintegration is anticipated to accelerate in the Upper Zemmgrund, which may result in an ice-free landscape within the next ~40–60 years. • We present a multi-proxy record of deglaciation in the Upper Zemmgrund, Austria. • Clean-ice glacier disintegration scenario with limited influence of surface debris • Heterogeneous recession in shared catchment driven by individual glacier geometry • 59 % decline in post-LIA glacier area, catchment likely ice-free within 60 years • Growing glacier instability will increase risk to downstream communities.