Our EORC team member Sebastian Buchelt published a new paper assessing potential systematic relationships between movement patterns and the internal structure of a rock glacier in the Central European Alps.
The study combines geophysical surveys (ground-penetrating radar – GPR; electrical resistivity tomography – ERT) with surface movement parameters derived from satellite-based differential SAR interferometry (DInSAR). For the latter, 5 years of Sentinel-1 DInSAR time series are processed and analysed using open-source tools (SNAP by ESA, pyrate by GeoScience Australia) to derive East-West displacement, elevation change with a ground sampling distance of 5 m as well as seasonal variability in velocity during the snow-free summer months. The results indicate that movement angle and seasonality are highly associated with different patterns in sub-surface structure, which can be linked to subunits of different morphological origins. Hence, the combination of geophysical surveys with DInSAR improves the understanding of current geomorphological surface dynamics.
The paper was published in the Wiley journal “Earth Surface Processes and Landforms” and co-authored by Julius Kunz, Tim Wiegand and Christof Kneisel. Some of our EAGLE students supported this work by joining one of the field work campaigns in 2022.
You can find the full abstract and open-access publication here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/esp.5993
