4th Swiss Geoscience Meeting, Bern 2006 Spatio-temporal variations in rockglacier kinematics: significance and challenge.

• Main Author: Roer Isabelle
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: permafrost
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.611.7903; http://geoscience-meeting.scnatweb.ch/sgm2006/SGM06_abstracts/19_Changing_Alp_Cryo/roer_isabelle_talk.pdf

Active rockglaciers represent typical indicators for the present occurrence of permafrost in high mountain geosystems. Due to their characteristics, the kinematics of these landforms implies important information on their sensitivity to climate-induced changes within the geosystem. Monitoring data on kinematics is compiled for a number of rockglaciers in the Turtmanntal, a meso-scale geosystem (area: 110 km2) in the central Swiss Alps. The measurements are realised by the application of ground-based and photogrammetric techniques (Roer et al. 2005a) and thus represent information on horizontal and vertical movements over a period of 30 years (1975 – 2006). In spite of differences in origin, geological and geomorphological setting of the single landforms, the photogrammetric data indicate for all active rockglaciers a distinct increase in horizontal movement rates between 1993-2001, compared to the period 1975-1993 (Roer et al. 2005b). Regarding the annual measurements between 2001 and 2006, highest horizontal velocities are observed in the years 2003/2004 and 2004/2005, while values are clearly lower in 2005/2006.