The Glaciation of High Asia + Ereference: From the Last Ice Age to the Present

This book summarizes four decades of glacial-geomorphological field research in Central and High Asia in an attempt to draw a significant link between Quaternary science research and paleoclimatology. Based on the latest geomorphological findings, this study offers a large-scale reconstruction of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) that in High Asia encompassed a total expanse of no less than three million km², including the Central Tibetan plateau with 2.4 million km². The author offers a complete reconstruction of the Late Glacial, Holocene, and Historical glacier advances as well as the successive Postglacial ablation stages extending to the present.

Taken together, the findings presented here provide the first insights into a global-climatic impact of the Last Glacial Maximum in Central and High Asia with respect to the current interglacial stage. The comparative data analyses point to an inland glaciation at subtropical latitude covering an area larger than the Nordic inland glaciation in Greenland. These insights are facilitated by a methodological approach, unprecedented in modern Quaternary research, that combines high-quality panoramic photography with high-resolution satellite imagery. This combination of terrestrial and aerial perspectives enables scientists and readers alike to visualize the geomorphology of the landscape as a three-dimensional space. The author's successful union of digital big data resources with classical geomorphological analysis offers an exciting new template for future research in Quaternary science and related fields.

Matthias Kuhle (*20 April 1948 in Berlin; + 25 April 2015 near Yaruphant, Nepal) was an internationally renowned German geographer at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he was a Professor of Geography and High Mountain Geomorphology from 1983 until his death in 2015. His main research area was the geomorphological reconstruction of a High Glacial inland ice sheet in High Asia, including Central Tibet. He studied geography, German philology, and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, and completed his Ph.D. on former glaciations in southern Iran. Subsequently, he extended his research focus to include the extreme high mountain regions of High Asia, most notably the Himalayas and Karakoram. Between 1973 and 2015, he conducted more than 44 scientific expeditions into these regions and other high-mountain areas around the world. Another of Dr. Kuhle’s research interests, shared with his wife Sabine Kuhle, was the philosophy of science and the cultural evolution of Western logic. On 25 April 2015, M. Kuhle unexpectedly died during an earthquake in Nepal.