Discriminating between glacier variations due to natural climate variability and those due to true climate change is crucial for the interpretation and attribution of past glacier changes, and for expectations of future changes. We explore this issue for the well-documented glaciers of Mount Baker in the Cascades Mountains of Washington State, USA, using glacier histories, glacier modeling, wea...

Several mid-late Holocene Glacier Peak tephras along with Mazama and Mount St. Helens Wn and P tephras were found in cores from Cooley and Rockslide lakes in southeastern British Columbia, 300 km northeast of Glacier Peak. The sediments in Cooley Lake host the late Holocene Glacier Peak A tephra (2010 calibrated (cal) years BP), four separate Glacier Peak Dusty Creek (GPDC) tephras (5780–5830 c...

Glacier-derived dissolved organic matter represents a quantitatively significant source of ancient, yet highly bioavailable carbon to downstream ecosystems1. This finding runs counter to logical perceptions of age–reactivity relationships, in which the least reactive material withstands degradation the longest and is therefore the oldest2. The remnants of ancient peatlands and forests overrun b...

We present a diagnostic glacier flowline model parameterized and constrained by new velocity data from ice-surface GPS installations and speckle tracking of TerraSAR-X satellite images, newly acquired airborne-radar data, and continental gridded datasets of topography and geothermal heat flux, in order to better understand two outlet glaciers of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Our observational d...

In this paper, a glacial module based on an enhanced temperature-index approach was successfully introduced into the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to simulate the glacier runoff and water balance of a glacierized watershed, the mountainous region of the Yarkant River Basin (YRB) in Karakoram. Calibration and validation of the SWAT model were based on comparisons between the simula...

Observed fluctuations of mountain glaciers are known to be among the best indicators of climate change (e.g., IPCC, 2013). Continuous glacier monitoring is thus crucial and must include the repeated creation of glacier inventories (Haeberli, 2004) in order to understand observed glacier changes and project their future evolution (e.g., Hoelzle et al., 2007; Abermann et al., 2009; Huss, 2012). F...

This study assesses changes in glacier area, velocity, and geodetic mass balance for the glaciers in the Manaslu region of Nepal, a previously undocumented region of the Himalayas. We studied changes between 1970 (for select glaciers), 2000, 2005, and 2013 using freely available Landsat satellite imagery, the SRTM Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and a DEM based on Worldview imagery. Our results s...

Glacier retreat as a consequence of climate change influences freshwater ecosystems in manifold ways, yet the physical and chemical bases of these effects are poorly studied. Here, we characterize how water temperature differs between alpine lakes with and without direct glacier influence on seasonal and diurnal timescales. Using high temporal resolution monitoring of temperature in 4 lakes loc...

Glacier-related applications of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in high mountain regions with steep topography are relatively rare. This study makes a contribution to the lack of UAS applications in studying alpine glaciers in the European Alps. We transferred an established workflow of UAS-based change detection procedures to Austria’s largest glacier, the Pasterze Glacier. We focused on a sel...

Eliot Glacier is a small (1.6 km) glacier on Mount Hood, Oregon, USA, and its ablation zone is largely covered with rock debris. We examine the interrelated processes of ablation rates, ice thickness and surface velocities to understand the retreat rate of this glacier. Since measurements began in 1901, the glacier has retreated 680m, lost 19% of its area and thinned by about 50m at the lower g...