Deriving continuous deglaciation chronology from infrequent historical outlines

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Glacial retreat exposes previously glaciated land to a wide range of surface processes. Continuing retreat sets up a natural experiment where the duration of impact of these processes increases with the distance to the glacier. Many pedological, ecological and geomorphic studies have leveraged such natural experiments. All such studies require quantification of the year of (most-recent) glacial retreat for positions in the proglacial valley. Sometimes this ‘year of retreat’ (YOR) is independently known, but often it is not. We present a semi-automatic open-source method that provides spatially exhaustive YOR rasters—from which the time since deglaciation can be simply derived—for proglacial areas by interpolating between glacial outlines of known age. The method guarantees exact reproduction of observed retreat ages, honours multiple retreat and re-advance stages and can deal with retreat into multiple glacial tongues. We illustrate the method for a study site in the Italian Alps (multiple glaciers in the Martelltal, Alto Adige). It is hoped that the easy-to-use method is helpful for a wide range of proglacial studies.

Forschungsprojekte

Research Unit SEHAG - Sensitivity of high Alpine geosystems to climate change since 1850 (SEHAG) - Phase II

SEHAG Subproject 8 - Sediment connectivity, delivery, and the propagation of changes in high Alpine geosystems - Phase II