How glaciers would look like today in a world without Us ?

4 to 6 months in 2021

During the last decades, most of the glaciers all around the world have been shrinking and retreating, as a consequence of the ongoing warming of the climate. Current researches are conducted to make future projections of the glaciers for the coming century. This master project will approach the question of what would be the current shape of glaciers if the climate would not have been under the influence of the anthropogenic forcings. How these glaciers would look like today in a world without the human beings ? For that purpose, we will focus on two emblematic glaciers of the French Alps : Mer de Glace and Argentière in the Chamonix Valley. Using the glacier flow model Elmer/Ice, the evolution of these glaciers since the little ice age (for which glaciers in the Alps presented their last maximal extension) up to present will be reconstructed assuming different climatic scenarios accounting or not for anthropogenic forcings. The climate data produced under the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparion Project (DAMIP) will be used to build temperature and precipitation datasets in different experiments including and excluding greenhouse gases and aerosols to understand their respective contributions to the variability of the climate and the glaciers in the Alpine area over 1850-2014. The model will be first validated by running a reference simulation under the real climate and comparing these results to the observations acquired on these two glaciers over the last decades.