Recent warming has had enormous impacts on glaciers and high-mountain environments. Hazards have changed or new ones have emerged, including those from glacier lakes that form as glaciers retreat. The Andes of Peru have repeatedly been severely impacted by glacier lake outburst floods in the past. An important recent event occurred in the Cordillera Blanca in 2010 when an ice avalanche impacted...

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) has been observed by satellite optical remote sensing, altimetry, and gravimetry for a variety of geophysical parameters, including water storage change. However, each of these sensors has its respective limitation in the parameters observed, accuracy and spatial-temporal resolution. Here, we utilized an integrated approach to combine remote sensing imagery, digital ele...

[1] Airborne radar sounding over the Thwaites Glacier (TG) catchment and its surroundings provides the first comprehensive view of subglacial topography in this dynamic part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and reveals that TG is underlain by a single, broad basin fed by a dendritic pattern of valleys, while Smith Glacier lies within an extremely deep, narrow trench. Subglacial topography...

Mapping changes in glacier extent from repeat optical satellite data has revealed widespread glacier decline in nearly all regions of the world over the past few decades. While numerous studies have documented the changes of the outlet glaciers of the Northern and Southern Patagonia Icefields (NPI/SPI), information about glacier changes in the Patagonian Andes (to the north of the NPI) is much ...

During summer 2013 we installed a network of 19 GPS nodes at the ungrounded margin of Helheim Glacier in southeast Greenland together with three cameras to study iceberg calving mechanisms. The network collected data at rates up to every 7 s and was designed to be robust to loss of nodes as the glacier calved. Data collection covered 55 days, and many nodes survived in locations right at the gl...

AIM To assess the spatial-temporal dynamics of primary succession following deglaciation in soil-dwelling lichen communities. LOCATION European Alps (Austria, Switzerland and Italy). METHODS Five glacier forelands subjected to relevant glacier retreat during the last century were investigated. In each glacier foreland, three successional stages were selected at increasing distance from the ...

Water level fluctuations of inland lakes are related to regional-scale climate changes, and reflect variations in evaporation, precipitation and glacier meltwater flowing into the lake area in its catchment. In this paper, Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) altimeter data and Landsat imagery (2002–09) are used to estimate Nam Co lake (Nyainqentanglha range, Tibetan Plateau) water ...

Most glaciers in China lie in high mountainous environments and have relatively large surface slopes. Common analyses consider glaciers’ projected areas (2D Area) in a two-dimensional plane, which are much smaller than glacier’s topographic surface extents (3D Area). The areal difference between 2D planar areas and 3D surface extents exceeds −5% when the glacier’s surface slope is larger than 1...

The assessment of glacier mass budget is crucial for assessing water reserves stored in glaciers. Derived glacier mass changes in the Muztag Ata and Kongur Tagh (MAKT) region in the eastern Pamir, northwestern China, is helpful in improving our knowledge of the dynamics of glaciers under a changing climate in High Mountain Asia. Here, glacier area and mass changes derived from remote sensing da...

Citation: Thomazo C, Buoncristiani J-F, Vennin E, Pellenard P, Cocquerez T, Mugnier JL and Gérard E (2017) Geochemical Processes Leading to the Precipitation of Subglacial Carbonate Crusts at Bossons Glacier, Mont Blanc Massif (French Alps). Front. Earth Sci. 5:70. doi: 10.3389/feart.2017.00070 Geochemical Processes Leading to the Precipitation of Subglacial Carbonate Crusts at Bossons Glacier,...