Glaciers and climate change by Johannes Oerlemans, A. A. Balkema Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001. No. of pages: xii + 148. ISBN 90 265 1813 7 (hardback).

✍ Scribed by John C. King

• Book ID: 102390308
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0899-8418
• DOI: 10.1002/joc.880

✦ Synopsis

ISBN 90 265 1813 7 (hardback)

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Valley glaciers comprise less than 1% of the volume of the terrestrial cryosphere yet they are of considerable economic and climatological importance. In many regions, hydropower and irrigation schemes are reliant on glacial meltwater, and, recently, glaciers have been exploited to provide year-round skiing for those too impatient to wait for conventional pistes to reopen in winter. Because of their small size and their location with respect to the equilibrium line, valley glaciers respond more rapidly than the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to changes in climate. This makes glacier length records a potentially valuable resource for studying recent climate variability and explains why, in recent years, valley glaciers have made a contribution to global sea-level rise that is disproportionate to their area.

Johannes Oerlemans modestly describes his book as '. . . the personal reflections of a meteorologist who gradually became interested in glaciers. . .'. As leader of the Ice and Climate Group at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, he has directed a series of field experiments on temperate and polar glaciers that have greatly advanced our understanding of how glaciers respond to climatic forcing. He has contributed as a lead author to all three IPCC scientific assessment reports and is recognized as a leading authority on the interactions between the terrestrial cryosphere and climate. Readers will, therefore, have high expectations of this book, and I, for one, was not disappointed.

The first four chapters of the book concentrate on the processes that control the mass balance of a glacier. Valley glaciers present a challenging environment to the micrometeorologist, with a highly inhomogeneous surface, extreme near-surface temperature gradients and very shallow katabatic winds. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in developing models that relate glacier mass balance to broad-scale climate variables. Variations in mass balance are, however, only the first part of the story, as glaciers are dynamic systems and changes in input will generate corresponding variations in ice flow that bring the glacier back towards equilibrium. In Chapters 5-8, models of increasing complexity for describing the flow of glaciers are developed and then applied to real glaciers. It is encouraging to find that relatively simple models are capable of reproducing observed glacier behaviour fairly realistically.

Chapter 9 is concerned with inverse modelling. Given a record of glacier length variations, can one reconstruct a climate history of the region? There are encouraging indications that the inverse problem is well posed and reconstructions of climate from glacier records can provide