Retreat of Mediterranean glaciers since the Little Ice Age: Case study of Ghiacciaio del Calderone, central Apennines, Italy

Ghiacciaio del Calderone is the only glacier in the Italian Apennines and t he southernmost glacier in Europe. In this paper, the authors present a ten tative synthesis of the evolution of the glacier, with a particular focus o n evaluating the variations in area and thickness ranging from the end of t he Little Ice Age to the present. The analysis was performed in a GIS envir onment, using available data for georeferation (mainly from recent topograp hic maps) and for the reconstruction (from historical documents and old top ographic maps) of the variations of the glacier in the last two centuries. The resulting values, reconstructed and/or calculated, covering the period since the end of the Little Ice Age, of about 36 m of ice thickness and of about 59,000 m(2) of ice surface area represent the glacier loss by 1990.