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Information - CR7 Ever smaller than now? Holocene glacier history with climatic background (co-listed in CL)
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Glaciers are important climatic proxy: their modern retreat shows how coherent is their behavior with global climatic changes. However due to generally low accuracy of moraine dating and discontinuous records they are seldom used for the modeling and assessments of climate change in the future.
Glaciers are retreating in most parts of the World. The questions arise: where they ever smaller than now? What kind of evidence do we have to answer this question? What climatic conditions are behind the modern recession and are the same causes responsible for the glacier retreat of previous centuries? What is the role of orbital changes, solar, volcanic and human activity in these processes? What is the role of the modes of variability such as NAO, ENSO etc. on the long-term run? What is the major progress in the improvement of glacial chronologies, in the development of new approaches in reconstructing of glacier history, in modeling of former glacier variations? How the multi-proxy approaches can improve the accuracy of the dating? How well do agree the continuous and discontinuous time series? Is there any progress in the poorly studied areas? How well the glacier reconstructions agree with the other climatic proxies? Do mass balance reconstructions correspond to the former glacier front variations? What is the future of the glaciers basing on our knowledge of their past behavior? Are there any estimations of the runoff of decreased glaciers? How useful are they for the future assessment of water resources in the mountain areas? These are major questions that we would like to address to a broad community of glaciologists, geomorphologists, glaciohydrologists, and climatologists dealing with modern and Holocene glaciers.
The most crucial questions are:
1) What is the evidence regionally and globally? (Methodology to assess minimum extents of glaciers)
2) What are the climatic conditions inferred (combination of PP, TT and seasonality, modeling)
3) What were the forcing factors producing such climatic conditions (variability and forcing at different scales; interannual to millennial)
4) What are the consequences for the future, in particular the water issue.
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