The glaciated landscape across the First World War front: quantitative reconstructions based on digitized historical images and modern techniques

Abstract

The Italian/Austro-Hungarian front of the First World War (WWI) crossed several of the most glacierized groups in the Eastern Italian Alps. Photos taken by Austrian and Italian soldiers at that time document the state of various glaciers, in a period when measurements of length change were scarce or absent. Indeed, for many glaciers, the glaciological campaigns started or resumed only after the WWI, and this is the reason why the ‘1920’ glacier expansion is not well documented in this geographic area. In this work, we propose a workflow aimed at the quantitative reconstruction of some Italian glaciers from WWI photos, by using the mono- photogrammetric method also known as monoplotting. The workflow can be applied to any digitized historical image of a glacier, even in the absence of information about the camera position and camera calibration parameters, provided that a digital elevation model (DEM) with metric or sub-metric resolution is available.