Thirty-two cosmogenic 36Cl surface exposure ages constrain the timing of two late Pleistocene glacial advances in the western Ahklun Mountains, southwestern Alaska. Boulders were sampled from one early Wisconsin (sensu lato) and six late Wisconsin moraines deposited by ice-cap outlet glaciers and local alpine glaciers. Four moraine boulders deposited during an extensive early Wisconsin ice-cap ...

In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, glaciers taught us a great lesson about the earth. In the 1820s and 1830s, Swiss naturalists established the existence of the Ice Age. Their key insight was the fact that the small glaciers found at high elevations in mountainous regions were remnants of vast sheets of ice that once had covered large portions of the earth’s surface. They combined ma...

[1] Glaciers draining westward from the Sierra Nevada divide, California, during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) were 7 times longer than east-draining glaciers. We address the degree to which this difference may be attributed to the topographic asymmetry of the west-tilted Sierran block and the climate asymmetry resulting from orographic modification of Pacific Ocean storms. We simulate kilomet...

Over the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has accelerated and contributed to global sea level rise. This has been partly attributed to dynamic changes in marine terminating outlet glaciers. Outlet glaciers at the northern margin of the ice sheet drain 40% of its area but are comparatively less well-studied than elsewhere on the ice sheet (e.g., central-west or sou...

Glaciers are one of the terrestrial essential climate variables (ECVs) as they respond very sensitively to climate change. A key driver of their response is the glacier surface mass balance that is typically derived from field measurements. It deserves to be quantified over long time scales to better understand the accumulation and ablation processes at the glacier surface and their relationshi...

[1] Ice discharge from the fastest glaciers draining the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets – Jakobshavn Isbrae (JI) and Pine Island Glacier (PIG)– continues to increase, and is now more than double that needed to balance snowfall in their catchment basins. Velocity increase probably resulted from decreased buttressing from thinning (and, for JI, breakup) of their floating ice tongues, and from...

[1] We compare satellite altimetry from the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat, 2003–2007) to older topographic maps and digital elevation models (1965– 1990) to calculate long-term elevation changes of glaciers on the Svalbard Archipelago. Results indicate significant thinning at most glacier fronts with either slight thinning or thickening in the accumulation areas, except for g...

Temperate alpine glacier survival is dependent on the consistent presence of an accumulation zone. Frequent low accumulation area ratio values, below 30%, indicate the lack of a consistent accumulation zone, which leads to substantial thinning of the glacier in the accumulation zone. This thinning is often evident from substantial marginal recession, emergence of new rock outcrops and surface e...

A widespread loss of glacier area and volume has been observed in the European Alps since the 1980s. In addition to differences among various regions of the Alps, different responses to climate change characterize neighboring glaciers within the same region. In this study we describe the glacier changes in the Ortles-Cevedale group, the largest glacierized area in the Italian Alps. We analyze t...

Mountain ranges are the world's natural water towers and provide water resources for millions of people. However, their hydrological balance and possible future changes in river flow remain poorly understood because of high meteorological variability, physical inaccessibility, and the complex interplay between climate, cryosphere, and hydrological processes. Here, we use a state-of-the art glac...