Glacier retreat

The retreat of glaciers will be the most obvious change in the Alps as a result of climate change. Model calculations of the expected glacier retreat in relation to the reference period 1971-1990 are shown in Fig. 3a. They were calculated for a warming in summer between +1 and +5°C and a change in annual rainfall between -20% and +30%. 

Keywords Alpine diatoms, Alpine fishes, mental indicator. Glacier retreat... 

In places where glaciers retreat or do not reach the shore outwash streams emanating from them, they often deposit their bed load as proglacial fans and deltas, which become subject to normal marine processes. 

Pagli C, Sigmundsson F (2008) Will present day glacier retreat increase volcanic activity Stress induced by recent glacier retreat and its effect on magmatism at the Vatnajokull ice cap, Iceland. Geophys Res Lett 35. doi 10.1029/2008GL033510... 

For temperate regions, the history of the surface temperature of the oceans is stored in the glaciers of those regions, but glaciers have random advances and retreats which spoil the orderly sequence of the historic yearly ice layers. 

In Europe, the archivists have pioneered the evaluation of past climate changes from records of wine harvests and from drawings showing the advance and retreat of glaciers. This great body of work is excellently reviewed by Ladurie [62]. 

The best view on Mt. Desert Island is from the top of Cadillac Mountain. This mountain rises 1,532 feet, making it the highest mountain on the Atlantic seaboard. From the summit, you can gaze back toward the mainland or out over the Atlantic Ocean and contemplate the beauty created by a retreating glacier. 

Loess is especially common in parts of China and US Midwestern states. Chinese loess primarily forms from the wind erosion of the uplifting Himalaya Mountains under arid and semiarid conditions. In the US Midwest, loess accumulated as winds scoured deposits left by retreating glaciers about 10000 years ago (Press and Siever, 2001), 318-319. 

Pleistocene The first geologic epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era that ended 10,000 years ago with the retreat of the last glaciers. 

Anderson S., Drever J. I., Frost C. D., and Holden P. (2000) Chemical weathering in the foreland of a retreating glacier. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 64, 1173-1189. 

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