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Mountain cryosphere changes as
climate-change indicators
Wilfried Haeberli, Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics Group,
Geography Department University
of Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract: Many mountain regions reach altitudes with severe
climatic conditions where low temperatures reflect essential
limits to living conditions. Such areas also constitute most
characteristic and attractive landscapes dominated by snow and
ice. The two perennial ice components, glaciers and permafrost,
react sensitively to changes in atmospheric temperature because of
their proximity to the melting point. As a consequence, climatic
changes during the 20th century indeed caused pronounced effects
in the glacial and periglacial
belts of mountain areas. This development was accompanied by
increasing activities of man in cold high mountain ranges. It is,
in fact, the combination of ice vanishing and human impact, which
has introduced the most striking changes in high mountain
landscapes. Such changes in the directly visible (glaciers) and
more invisible (permafrost) components of the mountain cryosphere
are of highest significance not only as key indications
of accelerating change at local to regional and global scales.
They are now monitored as part of global climate-related observing
systems.
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