Abstract
Final report of the Task Force on Permafrost Creep and Rock Glacier Dynamics. This Task Force was established in 1998 by the International Permafrost Association (IPA) and the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI; now the Commission on Cryospheric Sciences, CCS) with Wilfried Haeberli and Bernard Hallet as co-chairs in order: (1) to define the state of knowledge relevant to the flow and evolution of perennially frozen ice/rock mixtures; and (2) to provide an overview of ongoing studies that obtain quantitative information from drilling, geophysical soundings, geodetic/photogrammetric monitoring and measurements of surface conditions. For this purpose, a special half-day workshop took place on 27 March 2001 within the framework of the First European Permafrost Conference in Rome, Italy (Rea, §). Further discussions followed during and after the 8th International Conference on Permafrost in Zurich (20–25 July 2003). The present contribution is based on the corresponding results and constitutes the final product of the Task Force. The following colleagues served as lead authors of the main subsections in this report: thermal conditions: Ole Humlum (surface, active layer) and Daniel Vonder Mühll (boreholes); composition: Norikazu Matsuoka (rocks) and Roger Elconin (ice); geometry/kinematics: Andreas Kääb and Viktor Kaufmann (photogrammetry, geodesy); and rheology: Sarah Springman, Lukas Arenson (mountains) and Branko Ladanyi (lowlands).
Haeberli, Wilfried