XX century: Brief historical outline of Soviet/Russian glaciology

Abstract

The article describes the formation and development of Soviet glaciology during the second half of the XX century and the role of the Glaciological Department of the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences in this process. The Department of Glaciology had been organized in 1957 by outstanding Soviet scientist G.A. Avsyuk. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) Soviet glaciologists worked in Antarctica, on the Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, as well as in the Polar Urals, where a permanent station was established and operated until disintegration of the Soviet Union. In succeeding years comprehensive field studies of glaciers were carried out in the Caucasus, in mountains of Central Asia and at Spitsbergen. Since 1961, the results were published in the periodical issues «Data of Glaciological Studies». In 2010, this edition was transformed into an academic journal under the title «Ice and Snow». Two years later, along with the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Geographical Society became its co-founder. This is a quarterly journal.

In the early 1960s, special Division of Glaciology had been organized in the Russian Geophysical Committee under Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and later on, members of this Department regularly organized All-Union (then All-Russian) glaciological symposia. These were held in different cities of the Soviet Union/Russia. A total of 16 glaciological symposia took place from 1961 to 2016. In addition, in 1970-80s the Department of Glaciology annually conducted school workshops on different areas of glaciology. In the 1970s, a program had been developed for continuous observations of the glacier fluctuations of three classes, differing in degree of detail; these works were carried out until disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1965-1982, Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Hydrometeorological Service collected data to compile the USSR Glacier Inventory, and the Department of Glaciology of the Institute of Geography had organized for this purpose the Pamir expedition that carried out field investigations from 1968 to 1974. The USSR Glacier Inventory was the first one in creation of the world catalogue of glaciers, which had been completed at the beginning of the XXI century. In 1997, the World Atlas of Snow and Ice Resources had been published; it was based on the whole complex of data available in the XX century on the state of the present-day glaciers. At the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, there comes a time of the space age, when the main sources of our knowledge about the Earth are the satellite images of different scales and properties.