Current behaviour and dynamics of the lowermost italian glacier (montasio occidentale, julian alps)

Abstract

Smaller glaciers (<0.5 km 2 ) react quickly to environmental changes and typically show a large scatter in their individual response. Accounting for these ice bodies is essential for assessing regional glacier change, given their high number and contribution to the total loss of glacier area in mountain regions. However, studying small glaciers using traditional techniques may be difficult or not feasible, and assessing their current activity and dynamics may be problematic. In this paper, we present an integrated approach for characterizing the current behaviour of a small, avalanche-fed glacier at low altitude in the Italian Alps, combining geomorphological, geophysical and highresolution geodetic surveying with a terrestrial laser scanner. The glacier is still active and shows a detectable mass transfer from the accumulation area to the lower ablation area, which is covered by a thick debris mantle. The glacier owes its existence to the local topo-climatic conditions, ensured by high rock walls which enhance accumulation by delivering avalanche snow and reduce ablation by providing topographic shading and regulating the debris budget of the glacier catchment. In the last several years the glacier has displayed peculiar behaviour compared with most glaciers of the European Alps, being close to equilibrium conditions in spite of warm ablation seasons. Proportionally small relative changes have also occurred since the Little Ice Age maximum. Compared with the majority of other Alpine glaciers, we infer for this glacier a lower sensitivity to air temperature and a higher sensitivity to precipitation, associated with important feedback from increasing debris cover during unfavourable periods.

High-Resolution Monitoring of Current Rapid Transformations on Glacial and Periglacial Environments

“…strong precipitation events, strong heat waves, heavy avalanche activity). The first results for the hydrological year 2010-'11 have been presented by Carturan et al, (2011Carturan et al, ( , 2012Carturan et al, ( and 2013. In this paper we compare these results with new data collected in the year 2011-'12 (when meteorological conditions were rather different), which enabled the verification of some conclusions drawn by Carturan et al, (2013) concerning the response of this glacier to climatic changes.…”

Analysis of the mass balance time series of glaciers in the Italian Alps

“…There are notably high correlations in the Ortles Cevedale between Careser and La Mare and between Fontana Bianca and La Mare glaciers. A similarly high correlation is observed between Pendente and Malavalle glaciers in Val Ridanna, whereas there is a much lower correlation between the two glaciers of the Gran Paradiso Group, which suggests that differences in local topo-climatic factors can be decisive on such small ice bodies (e.g., Kuhn, 1995;DeBeer and Sharp, 2009;Carturan et al, 2013c;Scotti et al, 2014;Colucci and Guglielmin, 2015). For most glaciers, B a is more correlated to B s than to B w (Table 4) ablation.…”

Sensitivity of Very Small Glaciers in the Swiss Alps to Future Climate Change

“…Several new monitoring techniques, e.g., relying on terrestrial/airborne laserscanning or drone-based acquisition of terrain models were tested (Carturan et al, 2013;Carrivick et al, 2015;Piermattei et al, 2015). Both in Southern Europe and in the Alps, very small glaciers were found to be subject to strong retreat and mass loss over the last century (e.g., Triglav-Čekada and Gabrovec, 2013;Fischer et al, 2015;Marti et al, 2015).…”