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Like many comparable mountain ranges at lower latitudes, the European Alps are increasingly losing their glaciers. Following roughly 10,000 years of limited climate and glacier variability, with a slight trend of increasing glacier sizes to Holocene maximum extents of the Little Ice Age, glaciers in the Alps started to generally retreat after 1850. Long-term observations with a monitoring network of unique density document this development. Strong acceleration of mass losses started to take place after 1980 as related to accelerating atmospheric temperature rise. Model calculations, using simple to high-complexity approaches and relating to individual glaciers as well as to large samples of glaciers, provide robust results concerning scenarios for the future: under the influence of greenhouse-gas forced global warming, glaciers in the Alps will largely disappear within the 21st century. Anticipating and modeling new landscapes and land-forming processes in de-glaciating areas is an emerging research field based on modeled glacier-bed topographies that are likely to become future surface topographies. Such analyses provide a knowledge basis to early planning of sustainable adaptation strategies, for example, concerning opportunities and risks related to the formation of glacial lakes in over-deepened parts of presently still ice-covered glacier beds.

The climate sensitivity of Abrahamsenbreen, a 20 km long surge-type glacier in northern Spitsbergen, is studied with a simple glacier model. A scheme to describe the surges is included, which makes it possible to account for the effect of surges on the total mass budget of the glacier. A climate reconstruction back to AD 1300, based on ice-core data from Lomonosovfonna and climate records from Longyearbyen, is used to drive the model. The model is calibrated by requesting that it produce the correct Little Ice Age maximum glacier length and simulate the observed magnitude of the 1978 surge. Abrahamsenbreen is strongly out of balance with the current climate. If climatic conditions remain as they were for the period 1989–2010, the glacier will ultimately shrink to a length of about 4 km (but this will take hundreds of years). For a climate change scenario involving a 2 m year−1 rise of the equilibrium line from now onwards, we predict that in the year 2100 Abrahamsenbreen will be about 12 km long. The main effect of a surge is to lower the mean surface elevation and thereby to increase the ablation area, causing a negative perturbation of the mass budget. We found that the occurrence of surges leads to a faster retreat of the glacier in a warming climate. Because of the very small bed slope, Abrahamsenbreen is sensitive to small perturbations in the equilibrium-line altitude. If the equilibrium line were lowered by only 160 m, the glacier would steadily grow into Woodfjorddalen until, after 2000 years, it would reach Woodfjord and calving would slow down the advance. The bed topography of Abrahamsenbreen is not known and was therefore inferred from the slope and length of the glacier. The value of the plasticity parameter needed to do this was varied by +20 and −20%. After recalibration the same climate change experiments were performed, showing that a thinner glacier (higher bedrock in this case) in a warming climate retreats somewhat faster.

We present an inverse modeling approach to reconstruct annual accumulation patterns from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data. A coupled surface energy balance-snow model simulates surface melt and the evolution of subsurface density, temperature, and water content. The inverse problem consists of iteratively calibrating accumulation, serving as input for the model, by finding a match between modeled and observed radar travel times. The inverse method is applied to a 16km GPR transect on Nordenskioldbreen, Svalbard, yielding annual accumulation patterns for 2007-2012. Accumulation patterns with a mean of 0.75meter water equivalent (mwe)a(-1)contain substantial spatial variability, with a mean annual standard deviation of 0.17mwea(-1), and show only partial consistency from year to year. In contrast to traditional methods, accounting for melt water percolation, refreezing, and runoff facilitates accurate accumulation reconstruction in areas with substantial melt. Additionally, accounting for horizontal density variability along the transect is shown to reduce spatial variability in reconstructed accumulation, whereas incorporating irreducible water storage lowers accumulation estimates. Correlating accumulation to terrain characteristics in the dominant wind direction indicates a strong preference of snow deposition on leeward slopes, whereas weaker correlations are found with terrain curvature. Sensitivity experiments reveal a nonlinear response of the mass balance to accumulation changes. The related negative impact of small-scale accumulation variability on the mean net mass balance is quantified, yielding a negligible impact in the accumulation zone and a negative impact of -0.09mwea(-1)in the ablation area.