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.

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.

Glacier Science and Environmental Change is an authoritative and comprehensive reference work on contemporary issues in glaciology. It explores the interface between glacier science and environmental change, in the past, present, and future. Written by the world’s foremost authorities in the subject and researchers at the scientific frontier where conventional wisdom of approach comes face to face with unsolved problems, this book provides: state-of-the-art reviews of the key topics in glaciology and related disciplines in environmental change cutting-edge case studies of the latest research an interdisciplinary synthesis of the issues that draw together the research efforts of glaciologists and scientists from other areas such as geologists, hydrologists, and climatologists color-plate section (with selected extra figures provided in color at www.blackwellpublishing.com/knight). The topics in this book have been carefully chosen to reflect current priorities in research, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, and the developing relationship between glaciology and studies of environmental change. Glacier Science and Environmental Change is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate research students, and professional researchers in glaciology, geology, geography, geophysics, climatology, and related disciplines.

The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850. The effects on the landscape and the daily life of people have been particularly apparent in Norway and the Alps. This major book places an extensive body of material relating to Europe, in the form of documentary evidence of the history of the glaciers, their portrayal in paintings and maps, and measurements made by scientists and others, within a global perspective. It shows that the glacial history of mountain regions all over the world displays a similar pattern of climatic events. Furthermore, fluctuations on a comparable scale have occurred at intervals of a millennium or two throughout the last ten thousand years since the ice caps of North America and northwest Europe melted away. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the Little Ice Age, by an author whose research experience of the subject has been extensive. This book includes large numbers of maps, diagrams and photographs, many not published elsewhere, and very full bibliographies. It is a definitive work on the subject, and an excellent focus for the work of economic and social historians as well as glaciologists, climatologists, geographers, and specialists in mountain environment.

The Great Ice Age documents and explains the natural climatic and palaeoecologic changes that have occurred during the past 2.6 million years, outlining the emergence and global impact of our species during this period. Exploring a wide range of records of climate change, the authors demonstrate the interconnectivity of the components of the Earths climate system, show how the evidence for such change is obtained, and explain some of the problems in collecting and dating proxy climate data. One of the most dramatic aspects of humanity's rise is that it coincided with the beginnings of major environmental changes and a mass extinction that has the pace, and maybe magnitude, of those in the far-off past that stemmed from climate, geological and occasionally extraterrestrial events. This book reveals that anthropogenic effects on the world are not merely modern matters but date back perhaps a million years or more.

Antarctic Climate Evolution is the first book dedicated to furthering knowledge on the evolution of the world’s largest ice sheet over its ~34 million year history. This volume provides the latest information on subjects ranging from terrestrial and marine geology to sedimentology and glacier geophysics. An overview of Antarctic climate change, analyzing historical, present-day and future developments Contributions from leading experts and scholars from around the world Informs and updates climate change scientists and experts in related areas of study

Glacier mass change is one of the main causes of past sea-level rise and glaciers will continue to be a major contributor in the 21st century. Despite their importance, knowledge about past glacier mass changes is strongly limited. Whereas detailed observations exist for a very small number of glaciers, empirical evidence on a regional or global scale is largely incomplete, both spatially and temporally. The reconstruction of past glacier states by automatic numerical methods could fill this lack of information. Such reconstructions play a major role to fully understand the sea-level budget. They are crucial in terms of model validation, can be used to detect and improve model uncertainties, and they increase the confidence in projections. A framework, which provides all requirements to obtain these reconstructions is the Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM). It is an open source numerical glacier model, that is globally applicable by modeling each glacier individually, and developed for the simulation of glacier changes. However, providing realistic glacier changes with OGGM during the course of the entire 20th century requires an adequate initial state for every of the ∼200.000 glaciers worldwide. To find these initial states, this thesis presents an approach using the only given information for every individual glacier: past climate information and present-day geometry. Synthetic experiments showed that even under perfectly known but incomplete boundary conditions, this is an ill-posed inverse problem, leading to non-unique solutions. The synthetic environment enables the determination of the accuracy of the method, but on the other hand comparisons with real world observations are not possible. In order to facilitate such comparisons, a glacier-specific calibration of the mass balance model is introduced. This procedure finally allows for a validation.