From	Georg Kaser	Date	Thu, 2 Jun 2005 20:19:37 +0200 (MEST)
To	Olga Solomina
CC	Ricardo Villalba, Keith Briffa, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Øyvind Paasche, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Eystein Jansen
Subject	Re: glacier bullet, glossary, structure
Dear Olga, I deeple apologize for haveing not read your e-mail earlier. I was so overburden with other obligations when coming back from Beijing that I gave myself the deadline of June 1 to start with IPCC work. As usual, circumstances have forced me to postpone this "dedaline" to next Monday. For this, I had not realised that Chapter 6 has its first deadline tomorrow. I have now gone through the "Glaiers during the LIA" and "Glaciers during the MWP" paragraphs as well as through the "glacier bullet" you send today. I think the LIA paragraph fits well into the Chapter 4 as a supplement to the "Observations" we concentrate on. The MWP is a bit out of focus (Observations!). As I mentioned earlier, I would be glad if chapter 6 could give glaciers approprate space as being the only climate proxies which are exclus´ively governed by physical processes and are, thus, much safer to interpret than any other proxies. The fact that they give filtered information as a mean over longer time periods enables them to represent climate. Over the last years, glaciologists have started to investigate the impact of climate seasonality on glaciers and have also started to separate thermal and hygric variables driving glaciers. All this deserves much attention also beyond the "Observations" to be coverd in Chapter 4. A comment on the bullet: this is fine. The only point I would change is the one mentioning Africa. For Lewis Glacier, Mount Kenya, advances have been reconstructed from moraines aoroud 1900 and (measured) thickening took place in the 1970s. Rwenzori glaciers have advanced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A compilation of this is attached as well as a figure and a table from an ongoing compilation of the post-LIA retreat of tropical glaciers I am working on. Please keep them confidential. Note from this figure also the exception Kilimanjaro glaciers play. They have to be seen separately from anything else we observe in the tropics mainly because of the absolute lack of movement on the Plateau (there are also other reasons which would go beyond a readable e-mail). So, to make the long story short: (i) Afrikan glaciers are no exception to the global picture and (ii) Kilimanjaro glaciers are an exception in Africa, in the Tropics, and on the global picture. Thus, Kili glaciers should not be used as an example neither for Africa nor for the tropics. Although I am highly interested in Kilimanjaro myself running a reserach project there, I strongly suggest to not overestimate its glaciers. Accoding to a request from Suasan Solomon I will address that briefly in Chapter 4.5. By the way, Kili glaciers only cover 2.6 km2 out of 2,500 km2 in the tropics (see table in attachement). Hope this is of help and if you have any further question feel free to contact me. Best wishes, Georg Georg Kaser ------------------------------------------------- Institut fuer Geographie Innrain 52 A-6020 INNSBRUCK Tel: ++43 512 507 5407 Fax: ++43 512 507 2895 http://meteo9.uibk.ac.at/IceClim/CRYO/cryo_a.html On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Olga Solomina wrote: > Dear colleagues, > > Please find attached my suggestions for the "Glacier bullet" (chapter 6). It > accumulates (and replaces) all "glacier cases" mentioned in different places > in our preliminary draft. > > I find that our first subdivision of the chapter to 2ka, 10ka etc. was more > natural rather than 6ka etc. - now we have a mixture of two systems. > > My suggestions for the glossary are: > > The Holocene (including Early, Mid, Late with approximate dates) > Little Ice Age > Neoglacial > > I also attach two paragraphs that I wrote for the Ch4 for the recent glacier > variations, though it is still unclear where it should be. I think both the > glacier recession from the LIA maximum positions and glacier advances > occurred during the MWP should be mentioned somewhere. > > Cheers, > olga > Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\KASER-1999GPCh.PDF" Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\TropGlac.doc"