On the imbalance and response time of glaciers in the european alps
- Zekollari, Harry Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW)ETH Zürich Zürich Switzerland - Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) Birmensdorf Switzerland - Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology Delft Netherlands - Laboratoire de Glaciologie, Université libre de Bruxelles Brussels Belgium
- Huss, Matthias Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW)ETH Zürich Zürich Switzerland - Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) Birmensdorf Switzerland - Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg Fribourg Switzerland
- Farinotti, Daniel Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW)ETH Zürich Zürich Switzerland - Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) Birmensdorf Switzerland
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2020
Published in:
- Geophysical Research Letters. - 2020, vol. 47, no. 2, p. e2019GL085578
English
Glaciers in the European Alps rapidly lose mass to adapt to changes in climate conditions. Here, we investigate the relationship and lag between climate forcing and geometric glacier response with a regional glacier evolution model accounting for ice dynamics. The volume loss occurring as a result of the glacier‐climate imbalance increased over the early 21st century, from about 35% in 2001 to 44% in 2010. This committed loss reduced to ~40% by 2018, indicating that temperature increase was outweighing glacier retreat in the early 2000s but that the fast retreat effectively somewhat diminished glacier imbalances. We analyze the lag in glacier response for each individual glacier and find mean response times of 50 ± 28 years. Our findings indicate that the response time is primarily controlled by glacier slope and secondarily by elevation range and mass balance gradient, rather than by glacier size.
- Faculty
- Faculté des sciences et de médecine
- Department
- Département de Géosciences
- Language
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- English
- Classification
- Hydrology
- License
- License undefined
- Identifiers
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- RERO DOC 328436
- DOI 10.1029/2019GL085578
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/308475
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