Ice thawing, mountains falling-are alpine rock slope failures increasing?

Abstract

Many high-mountain environments of the world have seen dramatic changes in the past years and decades. Glaciers are retreating and downwasting, often at a dramatically fast pace, leaving large amounts of potentially unstable debris, moraines and rock slopes behind. Although in the main invisible to the eye of an observer, permafrost, i.e. rock and debris with permanent zero or subzero temperatures, is thawing. Several slopes have become unstable and landslides potentially related to permafrost degradation have received wide-ranging attention from both scientists and the media. A number of those landslides can be related to the effects of recent changes in the cryosphere, which are ultimately driven by changes in climatic parameters, in particular temperature and precipitation.