Documentation of the retreat of a small debris-covered cirque glacier (Goessnitzkees, Austrian Alps) by means of teresstrial photogrammetry

The mapping of glacier fluctuations is an important task of environmental research. Several methods of glacier mapping on a local, regional and global scale are available. From a historical point of view, terrestrial photogrammetry was the first powerful tool in obtaining reliable metric information about glaciers in mountainous landscapes. Today, however, terrestrial photogrammetry is only applied occasionally in glacier studies, if at all. In this paper we seek to show that the availability of low-cost high resolution digital (consumer) cameras opens up new perspectives in glacier monitoring. Since digital photogrammetric software is readily available for 3D data capture, we conclude that there is a good chance of a revival of classical terrestrial photogrammetry in the digital domain. The potential of a fully digital approach using a low-cost digital consumer camera has been investigated in a case study. The main task of the study was to obtain parameters quantifying the retreat of the Goessnitzkees glacier from ground-based photographs taken at three different time periods (1988, 1997, 2003)