Abstract. The mountain cryosphere of mainland Europe is recognized to have important impacts on a range of environmental processes. In this paper, we provide an overview on the current knowledge on snow, glacier, and permafrost processes, as well as their past, current, and future evolution. We additionally provide an assessment of current cryosphere research in Europe and point to the different domains requiring further research. Emphasis is given to our understanding of climate–cryosphere interactions, cryosphere controls on physical and biological mountain systems, and related impacts. By the end of the century, Europe's mountain cryosphere will have changed to an extent that will impact the landscape, the hydrological regimes, the water resources, and the infrastructure. The impacts will not remain confined to the mountain area but also affect the downstream lowlands, entailing a wide range of socioeconomical consequences. European mountains will have a completely different visual appearance, in which low- and mid-range-altitude glaciers will have disappeared and even large valley glaciers will have experienced significant retreat and mass loss. Due to increased air temperatures and related shifts from solid to liquid precipitation, seasonal snow lines will be found at much higher altitudes, and the snow season will be much shorter than today. These changes in snow and ice melt will cause a shift in the timing of discharge maxima, as well as a transition of runoff regimes from glacial to nival and from nival to pluvial. This will entail significant impacts on the seasonality of high-altitude water availability, with consequences for water storage and management in reservoirs for drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower production. Whereas an upward shift of the tree line and expansion of vegetation can be expected into current periglacial areas, the disappearance of permafrost at lower altitudes and its warming at higher elevations will likely result in mass movements and process chains beyond historical experience. Future cryospheric research has the responsibility not only to foster awareness of these expected changes and to develop targeted strategies to precisely quantify their magnitude and rate of occurrence but also to help in the development of approaches to adapt to these changes and to mitigate their consequences. Major joint efforts are required in the domain of cryospheric monitoring, which will require coordination in terms of data availability and quality. In particular, we recognize the quantification of high-altitude precipitation as a key source of uncertainty in projections of future changes. Improvements in numerical modeling and a better understanding of process chains affecting high-altitude mass movements are the two further fields that – in our view – future cryospheric research should focus on.
Abstract. Despite the strong societal impact of mountain risks, their systematic documentation remains poor. Therefore, snow avalanche chronologies exceeding several decades are exceptional, especially in medium-high mountain ranges. This article implements a combination of historical and geographical methods leading to the reconstruction, at the scale of the entire Vosges Mountains (north-east of France), of more than 700 avalanches that have occurred since the late eighteenth century on 128 paths. The clearly episodic nature of the derived geo-chronology can be explained by three interrelated factors that have changed together over time: the body and reliability of sources, social practices conditioning the vulnerability and the natural hazard itself. Finally, the geo-chronology reflects the changes in the meaning of the hazard in social space. Specifically, the event which could be retrieved from the historical sources is an aspect of the interaction between society and its environment. These results confirm the role of the historian in contextualising and evaluating such data. It transforms these data into information that is relevant for mitigating risk and understanding its change over time. The work also demonstrates the usefulness of constructing an original database from a diverse suite of historical data and field investigations. This approach could be applied to other risk phenomena in the frequent situation in which archival data are sparse.
Abstract. The mountain cryosphere is recognized to have important impacts on a range of environmental processes. This 30 paper reviews current knowledge on snow, glacier, and permafrost processes, as well as their past, current and future The Cryosphere Discuss., doi:10.5194/tc-2016Discuss., doi:10.5194/tc- -290, 2017 Manuscript under review for journal The Cryosphere Published: 9 January 2017 c Author(s) 2017. CC-BY 3.0 License. 2 evolution in mountain regions in mainland Europe. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the current state of cryosphere research in Europe and point to the different domains requiring further research to improve our understanding of climate-cryosphere interactions, cryosphere controls on physical and biological mountain systems, as well as related impacts.We highlight advances in the modeling of the cryosphere, and identify inherent uncertainties in our capability of projecting changes in the context of a warming global climate. 5
Snow is highly sensitive to atmospheric warming. However, because of the lack of sufficiently long snow avalanche time series and statistical techniques capable of accounting for the numerous biases inherent to sparse and incomplete avalanche records, the evolution of process activity in a warming climate remains little known. Filling this gap requires innovative approaches that put avalanche activity into a long-term context. Here, we combine extensive historical records and Bayesian techniques to construct a 240-y chronicle of snow avalanching in the Vosges Mountains (France). We show evidence that the transition from the late Little Ice Age to the early twentieth century (i.e., 1850 to 1920 CE) was not only characterized by local winter warming in the order of +1.35 °C but that this warming also resulted in a more than sevenfold reduction in yearly avalanche numbers, a severe shrinkage of avalanche size, and shorter avalanche seasons as well as in a reduction of the extent of avalanche-prone terrain. Using a substantial corpus of snow and climate proxy sources, we explain this abrupt shift with increasingly scarcer snow conditions with the low-to-medium elevations of the Vosges Mountains (600 to 1,200 m above sea level [a.s.l.]). As a result, avalanches migrated upslope, with only a relict activity persisting at the highest elevations (release areas >1,200 m a.s.l.). This abrupt, unambiguous response of snow avalanche activity to warming provides valuable information to anticipate likely changes in avalanche behavior in higher mountain environments under ongoing and future warming.
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