Take a good look at the image on the cover: it is a reconstruction of the immense Isère glacier which died a little over 20,000 years ago in a lake several hundred meters deep, where today the city of Grenoble. At the same time, the site of Geneva was under ice and the lobe of the Rhône glacier crushed the suburbs of Lyon... At least ten times during the Quaternary era, the Alps were covered by ice fields which went from Sisteron in Munich!
To create these images and make past glaciations visible, Sylvain Coutterand studies the traces that giant glaciers have left in the landscape: blocks of rock carried up to several hundred kilometers from their place of origin, planed rocks, moraines covered since for a long time by vegetation... The author traces the birth of this science, geomorphology, whose discoveries have made it possible to reconstruct the past states of Alpine glaciers. More than 50 maps are presented in this atlas to measure the extent of the great glaciations and the speed of the current retreat of glaciers.
These images from my prehistory of Alpine glaciers are a powerful call for reflection at a time when their disappearance is a sad probability.
If you want to go and see in the field, The Atlas of Disappeared Glaciers offers you 10 hikes to discover the most beautiful glaciers in the Alps. There is urgency: “Global warming, if not controlled, will end up modifying in the short term these landscapes to which we are very attached”, writes in the preface the climatologist Jean Jouzel, member of the Academy of Sciences.