LFU:online

The students will develop a basic understanding of mountain climatology, the glaciers’s response to climate change and its interrelation with socioeconomics in past and present mountain environments.

After the Last Glacial Maximum 18 000 years ago, the Alpine ice cover shrank drastically, leaving open ground for early settlements. Traces of those large glaciers in the glacierized Alpine landscape paved the ground for the theory of ice ages, and thus theories of climate change. The readvance of glaciers up to a new glacial maximum at the end of the Little Ice Age, 150 years ago, again threatened people, with glaciers reaching bigger extensions than during most of the Holocene. Today Alpine glaciers are disintegrating, having lost more than 50% of their area since the Little Ice Age. We will summarize what we know about Alpine climate and climate change (and discuss the sources), and how exactly glaciers respond to climate change. Will the glaciers disappear within the next decades, and how would that affect life in the mountains? This is an interdisciplinary lecture, in addition to the scientific basis, legal, historical, and socioeconomic aspects will be discussed.

Lecture

Written test at the end

Will be provided in the first lecture

No previous knowledge required