In a pretty strong few days field work Anna, Irmi, Lukas and I measured a bunch of debris thicknesses over the debris-covered part of the Suldenferner. In fact we measured 105 locations, generally in a 100m spaced regular grid. At only 4 of the locations could we not dig deep enough to find glacier ice. 50% of the debris cover is between 6 and 16 cm thick.
The map above shows the debris thickness data represented as circles of a size that scales with the debris thickness in centimetres. The background is the 2011 orthoimage obtained from the Autonomous Province of Bozen and the glacier outline is a bit of an old one now as its from 2005, from my colleagues in the Geography Institute here in Innsbruck. The darker orange circles are those at which we did not manage to dig down to ice.
