OGGM - Open Global Glacier Model

OGGM is an open source model for glacier dynamics that is able to simulate past and future mass-balance, volume and geometry of (almost) any glacier in the world. This model will help us to better understand the response of glaciers to climate change, and better quantify their contribution to sea level rise.

OGGM website

POP Greenland

A scientific ski traverse of Greenland to sample the levels of pollution in the snow. Persistent organic pollutants (the POPs of the title) include pesticides, fire retardants and other man-made environmental pollutants that make their way into the Arctic ecosystems and are now widely found in the food web of Arctic oceans.

Project website

Northeast Greenland Caves

The Northeast Greenland Caves Project uses cave deposits to find out when in the past Greenland was warmer than today and to better understand the climate during that time so that it may be used as an analogue for the future.

North East Greenland Caves Project

Lake Hallstatt: a Paleoflood archive

In collaboration with Natural History Museum Vienna and international collaboration partners within the Face Alps project, University of Innsbruck researchers Dr. Stefan Lauterbach (with support from FWF) and Prof. Michael Strasser aim to establish a high-resolution calendar of sedimentary event deposits (such as flooding, mass-movements, and rock-falls) over the last 5000 years.

To do so, they have extracted a series of lake sediment cores from the depths of Lake Hallstatt. Studying these sediments may also shed new light on the early history of salt mining and related human activities at Hallstatt.

For further updates, click here to read Dr. Lauterbach’s research blog post in Der Standard   

Innsbruck Box (i-Box)

Innsbruck Box (or i-Box for short) is a test bed for studying boundary layer processes in highly complex terrain.

Designed to be a long-term "reference box" for studying the characteristics of turbulence structure and exchange processes in truly complex topography, i-Box represents an integrated approach combining three-dimensional long-term turbulence observations with high-resolution numerical modeling. i-Box observational stations are located in the Inn Valley, an approximately northeast-southwest oriented valley in western Austria. The locations of the core sites (six turbulence stations) were chosen to represent different topographic features in order to secure the universality of the obtained results.

Further details   

Ortles Project

(PAMOGIS, Pollen analyses of the Mt. Ortles glaciers ice samples) Glacier ice archives important information about: i) climate (air temperature, amount of precipitation); ii) ecosystems (composition of the vegetation, drought, fire regimes) and iii) human society (changes in land use, slash and burn, emissions linked to mining and smelting).

By retrieving and analyzing three ice cores from Mt. Ortles (3905 m, Southern Tyrol, Italy), we will provide the first glacio-paleo-environmental records from this untapped area of the Alps and we will characterize the main factors influencing the European alpine environment during the last part of the Holocene. The studies of stable isotopes, major ions, trace elements, pollen, and a new specific molecular tracer of biomass burning (levoglucosan) from the glacier ice will enable a quantitatively comparison of the main factors driving the Alpine environment during human history. The ultimate goal is highlighting co-evolutionary and/or lead/lag processes regulating this system at centennial to millennial time scales. In the frame of the Ortles Project the aim of the pollen analyses is to provide a seasonal/annual timescale for the ice cores and to reconstruct past vegetation and land use changes in the Ortles region.

Further details   

ALP-IMP

ALP-IMP researchers will use the unique data potential existing in the “Greater Alpine Region” (GAR) to produce a consistent picture of regional climate variability in the region for the last 1000 years.

DoG - Atmospheric Downscaling for Glacierized mountain environments

Due to given restrictions in computing power, global atmospheric models generally consider mountainous terrains in a very simplified manner. As a consequence, mountain weather and climate are not well described in global atmospheric model output.

The DoG project tests and further developes so-called downscaling models, i.e., methods for correcting the global atmospheric model output in order to achieve a more realistic representation of local-scale atmospheric processes in glacierized mountain environments all over the world.

Further details   

Debris covered glaciers

Three ongoing projects in ACINN and Geography together aim to improve our understanding of the impact of surface rock debris on glacier behaviour. A rock layer on the surface protects the underlying ice from melting, meaning that the glacier behaves differently to a glacier with no surface rock cover.

This will affect the meltwater runoff and also how the moraine record of such glaciers relates to climate conditions.

More info can be found in articles on Dr Lindsey Nicholsons blog   

Projects:

• Dynamics of debris-covered glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya   

• High resolution spaceborne studies of mass balance processes on glaciers of the Khumbu Himal, Nepal (GlHima-Sat)   

• Modeling of debris-covered glaciers   

Holocene tree-ring isotopes and glaciers

The Holocene Tree-Ring Isotopes and Glaciers Project combines climate information from Alpine glaciers with stable isotope data established on calendar-dated Alpine tree-ring samples from the last 9000 years.