Measuring the Critical Zone: Lessons from the Damma Glacier Critical Zone Observatory

The Damma glacier CZO is located in the central Alps in Switzerland and was established in particular to study the initial stages of weathering and soil formation. It consists of a partly glacierized catchment of about 10 km2, and contains a soil chronosequence formed by the glacier retreat covering about 150 years. Intensive coordinated multidisciplinary research started in 2007, first in the framework of the swiss Project BigLink, which was followed by the EU-FP7 project SoilTrEC. In this contribution I briefly describe the Damma glacier CZO and review the main results of 8 years of research.