Is that a relict rock glacier?

The distribution of rock glaciers is often used to investigate the occurrence of permafrost in mountain areas and to understand their climate and paleoclimate evolution. This requires the creation of regional and global inventories capable of discriminating active and relict landforms in order to forecast the presence or absence of ice in the ground. In this paper, geomorphological, geophysical and microclimatic surveys are performed on a rock glacier of the Carnic Alps (Eastern European Alps). In the classification currently used for implementing regional inventories of permafrost evidence in the Alps, this rock glacier would be defined as relict. However the geophysical, climatological and geomorphological results indicate that internal ice is widespread in large portions of the rock glacier. These are generally interpreted as ice in pore spaces and local ice lenses, probably without layers of massive ice. Moreover the occurrence of ice during the maximum thawing season at depths