The investigation of lichens on soil, plant debris and terricolous mosses in the glacier forefield of the Pasterze yielded 35 lichen species. Placidiopsis oreades Breuss (Verrucariales) is new to Austria. Three sampling sites were established at increasing distance from the glacier, in order to compare species diversity, abundance and composition within the forefield and with four other glacier...

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate fluctuations. The effects of climate warming are for instance evident in the continuous retreat of glaciers. In the paper, the movement of the Dongkemadi Glacier in the Qinhai-Tibetan Plateau and the Keqicar Baxi glacier motion in the Tianshan Mountains of western China are measured using two-pass differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry ...

Glaciers are interesting phenomena to scientists, mountaineers and tourists. Glaciers have a great impact on the local economy, power generation and water supply. Furthermore, the behaviour of glaciers is influenced by climate variations, such as changes in temperature. Monitoring glaciers can therefore give valuable insight to glaciologists. Two aspects of glaciers that can be monitored are th...

Analysis of stable oxygen isotope (δO) characteristics is a useful tool to investigate water provenance in glacier river systems. In order to attain knowledge on the diversity of δO variations in Greenlandic rivers, we examined two contrasting glacierised catchments disconnected from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). At the Mittivakkat Gletscher river, a small river draining a local temperate gla...

Discharge from marine-terminating outlet glaciers represents a key component of the Greenland Ice Sheet mass budget and observations suggest that mass loss from northwest Greenland has recently accelerated. Despite this, the factors controlling outlet glacier dynamics within this region have been comparatively poorly studied. Here we use remotely sensed data to investigate the influence of atmo...

With the help of ERS 1 and 2 tandem data, we have produced DEM and glacier movement of two major Himalayan glaciers in India. The glaciers showed good correlation but the surrounding areas had more decorrelation. Contours generated with ERS 1 and 2 SAR tandem data are comparable with topographic maps. We have used SRTM DEM to study the glacier movement involving two-pass differential method. Th...

We have used tide-gauge data from near Helheim Glacier, East Greenland, and GPS data acquired on the glacier to investigate the spectra of tidal forcing and flow response. For both the tidegauge and GPS time series, we calculated amplitudes and phases for a harmonic expansion using a limited set of harmonic constituents. We find that the semidiurnal constituents of the glacier flow are well mod...

High Mountain Asia hosts the largest glacier concentration outside the polar regions. These glaciers are important contributors to streamflow in one of the most populated areas of the world. Past studies have used methods that can only provide regionally-averaged glacier mass balances to assess the High Mountain Asia glacier contribution to rivers and sea level rise. Here we compute the mass ba...

As a sensitive indicator of climate change, mountain glacier dynamics are of great concern, but the ice motion pattern of an entire glacier surface cannot be accurately and efficiently generated by the use of only phase-based or intensity-based methods with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. To derive the ice movement of the whole glacier surface with a high accuracy, an integrated approac...

We present glacier thickness changes over the entire Pamir–Karakoram–Himalaya arc based on ICESat satellite altimetry data for 2003–2008. We highlight the importance of C-band penetration for studies based on the SRTM elevation model. This penetration seems to be of potentially larger magnitude and variability than previously assumed. The most negative rate of region-wide glacier elevation chan...