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    This is the first textbook to address all the components of the Earth's cryosphere – all forms of snow and ice, both terrestrial and marine. It provides a concise but comprehensive summary of snow cover, glaciers, ice sheets, lake and river ice, permafrost, sea ice and icebergs – their past history and projected future state. It is designed for courses at upper undergraduate and graduate level in environmental science, geography, geology, glaciology, hydrology, water resource engineering and ocean sciences. It also provides a superb up-to-date summary for researchers of the cryosphere. The book includes an extensive bibliography, numerous figures and color plates, thematic boxes on selected topics and a glossary. The book builds on courses taught by the authors for many decades at the University of Colorado and the University of Alberta. Whilst there are many existing texts on individual components of the cryosphere, no other textbook covers the whole cryosphere.
    Glaciology
    Glossary
    Iceberg
    Citations (122)
    High Mountain Asia (HMA), often referred to as the "third pole" of the world because its high elevation glaciers, contains the largest amount of fresh water outside the polar ice sheets. The region's hydrology is strongly controlled by variations in the timing and distribution of runoff from snow and glacier melt. Recent improvements in remote sensing technologies and atmospheric / land surface models provides new approaches for assessing the HMA cryosphere. A recently-funded NASA program aims to apply these tools to advance understanding of HMA cryospheric processes. Here we present an overview of planned team activities during the three-year project.
    The Taillon Glacier in the French Pyrénées offers one of the most detailed records of recent glacier fluctuations in the region. A comprehensive collection of early maps, paintings, and photographs, together with short-term measurements relating to the ice margins and glacier behavior, have made possible a full reconstruction of the glacier's history since the end of the 19th century. The general pattern of ice-front retreat has been punctuated by a series of significant local readvances, dated 1886–1890, 1906–1911, 1926–1928, 1945, and 1964. The record is compared with the more detailed histories of glaciers from the Alps, and signals a surprising degree of sensitivity for the Taillon Glacier, given its overall size and state of survival. [Key words: Taillon Glacier, Pyrénées, Little Ice Age, glaciology.]
    Glaciology
    Glacier morphology
    Little ice age
    Glacier mass balance
    Tidewater glacier cycle
    (1984). The Mountains of Northeastern Tasmania: A Study of Alpine Geomorphology, Theoretical Glaciology: Material Science of Ice and the Mechanics of Glaciers and Ice Sheets, Glacier Hazards, Late-Quaternary Environments of the United States, Der Dhaulagiri- und Annapurna-Himalaya: Ein Beitrag zur Geomorphologee extremer Hochgebirge. Arctic and Alpine Research: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 453-458.
    Glaciology
    Rock glacier
    Glacier morphology
    This text aims to fill a long-standing gap in the scientific literature. While there are many texts on individual components of the cryosphere – snow cover, glaciers, ice sheets, lake and river ice, permafrost, sea ice, and icebergs – there is no comprehensive account. The text is aimed at upper division undergraduates and beginning graduate students in environmental sciences, geography, geology, glaciology, hydrology, water resources engineering, and ocean sciences, as well as providing a reference source for scientists in all environmental science and engineering disciplines.
    Glaciology
    Iceberg
    The cryosphere is the frozen part of the Earth’s system. Snow and ice are the main constituents of the cryosphere and may be found in different states, such as snow, freshwater ice, sea ice, perma-frost, and continental ice masses in the form of glaciers and ice sheets. The present review mainly deals with state-of-the-art applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a special emphasize on cryospheric information extraction. SAR is the most important active microwave remote sensing (RS) instrument for ice monitoring, which provides high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface. SAR is an ideal sensor in RS technology, which works in all-weather and day and night conditions to provide useful unprecedented information, especially in the cryospheric regions which are almost inaccessible areas on Earth. This paper addresses the technological evolution of SAR and its applications in studying the various components of the cryosphere. The arrival of SAR radically changed the capabilities of information extraction related to ice type, new ice formation, and ice thickness. SAR applications can be divided into two broad classes-polarimetric applications and interferometric applications. Polarimetric SAR has been effectively used for mapping calving fronts, crevasses, surface structures, sea ice, detection of icebergs, etc. The paper also summarizes both the operational and climate change research by using SAR for sea ice parameter detection. Digital elevation model (DEM) generation and glacier velocity mapping are the two most important applications used in cryosphere using SAR interferometry or interferometric SAR (InSAR). Space-borne InSAR techniques for measuring ice flow velocity and topography have developed rapidly over the last decade. InSAR is capable of measuring ice motion that has radically changed the science of glaciers and ice sheets. Measurement of temperate glacier velocities and surface characteristics by using airborne and space-borne interferometric satellite images have been the significant application in glaciology and cryospheric studies. Space-borne InSAR has contributed to major evolution in many research areas of glaciological study by measuring ice-stream flow velocity, improving understanding of ice-shelf processes, yielding velocity for flux-gate based mass-balance assessment, and mapping flow of mountain glaciers. The present review summarizes the salient development of SAR applications in cryosphere and glaciology.
    Glaciology
    Sea ice concentration
    Citations (27)
    “Vanishing sea ice!” “Disintegrating ice shelves!” “Rising sea level!” Such proclamations illustrate the widening gap between the kind of glaciology that makes newspaper headlines and the kind of glaciology which is reinforced in standard scientific texts. It is as if there were two kinds of ice: a benign form such as that studied by Victorian gentlefolk and a new rogue form, of concern to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In truth, the difference is one of perspective: ice as a feature of the local land‐ or seascape versus ice as an active component of the Earth system. From the global perspective, the two most important attributes of Earth system ice, a.k.a. the cryosphere, are its high albedo (leading to a positive climate feedback) and the large mass of stored freshwater—roughly 70 m of sea‐level equivalent. These aspects are addressed in several chapters of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001. J. Bamber and T. Payne's ambitious book provides the backstory in the form of a coherent treatise.
    Glaciology
    Ice-albedo feedback
    Future sea level
    Mirroring
    Earth system science
    Citations (35)
    During the past four decades, breathtaking progress has been achieved in China from almost zero to increasingly advanced stages in glaciology and geocryology. The interactions between the cryosphere and climate are of great concern at present. Studies on the water resources in arid and cold regions, hazards control and cold regions engineering under a warming climate are critically important to the sustainable and concordant development of the regional economies and ecosystems. As a mechanism for the above topics, geographic information sciences have significantly facilitated the data processing and insights into the fledgling cryosphere sciences and therefore, should be expedited.
    Glaciology
    Citations (9)
    This chapter is the tenth in a series of 11 book-length chapters, collectively referred to as "this volume," in the series U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1386, Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World. In the other 10 chapters, each of which concerns a specific glacierized region of Earth, the authors used remotely sensed images, primarily from the Landsat 1, 2, and 3 series of spacecraft, in order to analyze that glacierized region and to monitor changes in its glaciers. Landsat images, acquired primarily during the period 1972 through 1981, were used by an international team of glaciologists and other scientists to study the various glacierized regions and (or) to discuss related glaciological topics. In each glacierized region, the present distribution of glaciers within its geographic area is compared, wherever possible, with historical information about their past areal extent. The atlas provides an accurate regional inventory of the areal extent of glacier ice on our planet during the 1970s as part of an expanding international scientific effort to measure global environmental change on the Earth's surface. However, this chapter differs from the other 10 in its discussion of observed changes in all four elements of the Earth's cryosphere (glaciers, snow cover, floating ice, and permafrost) in the context of documented changes in all components of the Earth System. Human impact on the planet at the beginning of the 21st century is pervasive. The focus of Chapter A is on changes in the cryosphere and the importance of long-term monitoring by a variety of sensors carried on Earth-orbiting satellites or by a ground-based network of observatories in the case of permafrost. The chapter consists of five parts. The first part provides an introduction to the Earth System, including the interrelationships of the geosphere (cryosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere), the biosphere, climate processes, biogeochemical cycles, and the critically important hydrologic cycle, in which glacier ice is the second largest reservoir of water after the oceans. The second part assesses the state of glaciers in all of the glacierized regions of the planet, primarily as drawn in the other 10 chapters. It includes sections on ice cores and the climate record they contain, volumetric changes in glaciers, harnessing spaceborne sensors to measure changes in glaciers, and related topics. The third part summarizes trends in global snow cover. The fourth part summarizes long-term changes in area and thickness of floating ice, including polar sea ice and freshwater (lake and river) ice. The fifth part assesses the loss of permafrost and changes in periglacial environments at high latitudes and high altitudes.
    Glaciology
    Citations (42)