Abstract
Global climate change is impacting sensitive alpine cryogenic regions, through slope instabilities in rocks and soils. Significant temperature increase at the air-ground surface interface may be accompanied by increased rainfall, more extreme storms and additional severe rise in mean global temperatures in the coming decades, enhancing risk of mass movement hazards to human life and infrastructure. Rock glaciers and degrading permafrost on steep Alpine slopes are particularly susceptible to warming and phase change in either massive or interstitial ground ice, which may lead to release of water, accelerated motions, initiation of landslides and instabilities. Accumulated failure in soil elements, determined on artificial frozen specimens of rock glacier materials at temperatures below 0 °C, is linked to these processes at field scale. A geophysical and geotechnical field characterisation and monitoring experiment is being conducted on a rock glacier that is undergoing thermally induced creep and growth of thermokarst. Preliminary investigations are described in this contribution.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the ETH Research Fund for supporting their Collaborative, Highly Interdisciplinary Research Project—(CHIRP1) through Grant No. CH1-01 09-3. Charly Wuilloud and Canton Valais are also thanked for supplementary technical and financial support. Without Ernst Bleiker, Marco Sperl, Thomi Keller, Lasse Rabenstein and Beat Rinderknecht, the fieldwork would not have been as successful. Professors Wolfgang Kinzelbach and Fritz Stauffer are acknowledged for their support. The authors offer their heartfelt thanks to all.
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Springman, S.M. et al. (2013). Rock Glacier Degradation and Instabilities in the European Alps: A Characterisation and Monitoring Experiment in the Turtmanntal, CH. In: Margottini, C., Canuti, P., Sassa, K. (eds) Landslide Science and Practice. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31337-0_1
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