Our time in Innsbruck is winding down and we are taking a couple of short trips in the Alps before returning to Utah. We are currently in the Hohe Tauern National Park, an area of Austria I've never visited before. We arrived today and spent some time visiting the very touristy but also very beautiful Krimml Waterfalls.
There was a information exhibit at the base of the waterfalls (collectively they drop over 1200 vertical feet) that examined water in all it's forms, including ice and glaciers. At it, I learned of some remarkable modeling work by Julien Seguinot and coauthors simulating the glacial history of the Alps over the last 120,000 years. The video is simply mind boggling.
It's difficult to comprehend a past in which the Alps were essentially entirely ice covered and glaciers were extending into the Alpine Foreland to the north and south of this remarkable mountain chain. Below is a the simulated reconstruction for about 30,000 years ago showing such a situation. The color fill is the simulated glacier surface velocity, so those glaciers issuing into the lowlands at the flanks of the Alps were moving fast and quite dynamic.
All I can say is science is cool, especially cryospheric science (the study of the frozen water part of the Earth system)!
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