Gletscher

Landscape painters were not only the first to visualize the grandeur of Alpine glaciers but were also pioneering researchers. Aside from their artistic qualities, the paintings provide valuable information on the appearance and distribution of glaciers from even before they were systematically observed. Particularly the paintings of Thomas Ender and Ferdinand Runk from early nineteenth-century depict Alpine glaciers with exacting attention to detail. The Austrian geographer and Alpine researcher Gernot Patzelt (b. 1939) examines Ender’s and Runk’s glacier paintings in this book and juxtaposes them with present-day photographs, making the consequences of global warming evident. The results of Patzelt’s research are summarized here along with a chronology of glacier and climate development over the past 50,000 years.