Remote sensing and interdisciplinary approach for studying glaciers

Remote sensing, which provides interesting input and approaches for multidisciplinary research and wide inventories, and which represents a very important tool in the strictly related fields of research and didactics, shows great potentialities in the specific area of the studies of glaciers (extension, balance and variations), glacier morphology and climate changes. In time, remote sensing applications for the analysis of glaciers and climate change have considerably increased, using different methodologies and obtaining significant results. In this paper, after a synthesis of some basic elements, we provide a detailed literary review, which sets out to underline the steps and results achieved and also to stimulate didactical considerations and hypothesis of work. Successively, we resume the main characteristics of specific glaciers, for which the European Space Agency (ESA-ESRIN) has provided images ad hoc and for each glacier we propose an interpretative analysis of these images. According to the scheme proposed by Fea et al. (2013), the principal aim is to define research of referral and some interpretative guidelines useful for interdisciplinary frameworks focussed on glaciers, where geography can play the role of collector between different sciences with the support of various geotechnologies.