Southern Carpathian rock glaciers: Inventory, distribution and environmental controlling factors

Rock glaciers are valuable diagnostic landforms indicating permafrost creeping during their genesis and activity. Based on the analysis of high quality air-orthophoto and field work, a first polygon-based inventory of rock glaciers from the Southern Carpathians has been elaborated. In total, 306 rock glaciers were included in the inventory comprising 79 debris and 227 talus rock glaciers. Most of these landforms were classified as relict (258), while only 48, covering 2.81 km2, were considered intact. The size of rock glaciers, considered as a proxy for past environmental conditions, and the relationships with the predictor variables (lithology, aspect, contributing area, geographic coordinates, elevation and slope range) were analysed using bivariate statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and various post hoc tests. The statistical analysis revealed that the rock glaciers occurring in the highest mountain ranges in areas composed of granites and granodiorites are considerably larger than the others, because their duration of activity is greater. Strong dependences between rock glacier size and other topographic attributes (contributing area, aspect and slope range) were also confirmed. The rock glacier distribution in the Southern Carpathians is clearly controlled by topography, lithology and debris availability. The abundance of rock glaciers increases with altitude, but their size decreases slightly. In mountain units where granites and granodiorites predominate (Retezat and Parâng Mountains), the density of rock glaciers and the mean specific area covered by these spectacular landforms are considerably higher than in other areas. The higher continentality effects of the Southern Carpathians enabled the formation of rock glaciers at substantially lower elevations than in the Alps. The mean altitude of intact rock glaciers front, which could be used as a morphological indicator of discontinuous permafrost, is located at 2088 m.