Academic Training: Climate change and challenges for the environment

Climate change as seen by a geologist

Glaciers are an integrated part of the high altitudes and the high latitudes of our planet. They are sensitive to temperature and moisture changes and adjust their mass balances accordingly. By doing so they interact with their substratum, the geological basement and they produce characteristic imprints of their presence, their variability and their disappearance. In glacial geology and paleoglaciology such imprints of former glaciers are carefully recorded, mapped and, hopefully, dated in order to obtain amplitude and periodicity records of their changes - as forced by changing climate, as we believe. In the upcoming lectures three aspects will be discussed:

1. the last glaciation in the Swiss Alps. A reconstruction is shown based on fieldwork both in the mountains and in the foreland within a regional chronology. The reconstruction of the Last Glacial Maximum ice cover in the Alps points to unknown paleocirculation patterns with Europe-wide implications.
   
2. the glacial record of the past 10 000 years. What rates-of-change in the climate pattern can be seen in glacier oscillations?
   
3. the far-away record of Antarctica is discussed in the controversy of a stable or unstable East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

ENSEIGNEMENT ACADEMIQUE
ACADEMIC TRAINING
Françoise Benz 73127
academic.training@cern.ch

by Françoise Benz