Water quality and light absorption attributes of glacial lakes in Mount Qomolangma region

As they are products of glacier movement, the water body composition and water quality attributes of glacial lakes have distinct characteristics compared with inland lakes. Although satellite remote sensing provides an effective approach to monitor water quality, lack of in-situ measurement data on the status and environment surrounding glacial lakes presents a major constraint in relating satellite data to water quality indicators. This study presents findings of a preliminary investigation into water quality attributes of 3 glacial lakes in the Mount Qomolangma region. Suspended particulate matter （SPM）, light absorption attributes of phytoplankton, nonalgal particles （NAP）, and colored dissolved organic matter （CDOM） were measured. The suspended substance concentration varies markedly from 0-320 mg/L. This is considered to reflect differing stages of lake development. l-he chlorophyll concentra- tion is much lower than that found for inland lakes, as landscapes that surround these high altitude lakes have almost no vegetation growth. The phytoplankton and CDOM concentration depend on long-term stability of lake slopes. Given the lack of exogenous and endogenous inputs in the Qomolangma region, CDOM in glacial lakes is significantly lower than in inland lakes. These preliminary findings could support efforts to appraise estimates of water quality parameters using remotely sensed images.

Glacial Lakes in the Andes under a Changing Climate:A Review

In this article, we review the current knowledge of the glacial recession and related glacial lake development in the Andes of South America. Since the mid-1980 s, hundreds of glacial lakes either expanded or formed, and predictions show that additional hundreds of lakes will form throughout the 21 st century. However, studies on glacial lakes in the Andes are still relatively rare. Many glacial lakes pose a potential hazard to local communities, but glacial lake outburst floods(GLOFs) are understudied. We provide an overview on hazards from glacial lakes such as GLOFs and water pollution, and their monitoring approaches. In real-time monitoring, the use of unmanned aerial systems(UASs) and early warning systems(EWSs) is still extremely rare in the Andes, but increasingly authorities plan to install mitigation systems to reduce glacial lake risk and protect local communities. In support, we propose an international remote sensing-based observation initiative following the model of, for example, the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space(GLIMS) one, with the headquarters in one of the Andean nations.

Evolution and bathymetry of glacial lake at the lowest elevation in Nepal Himalaya

One of the prominent impacts of climate change induced glacier retreat in the Himalayas is the formation and expansion of glacial lakes. The newly formed glacial lakes are mostly located in higher altitudinal regions(4200-5800 m) of Himalaya,however, a new glacial lake(Kapuche, 28.446° N and 84.116° E) have been reported to be emerged in the relatively low elevation area of ~2450 m above sea level(masl) in the Nepal Himalaya. This short communication presents the remote sensing-based evolution and field-based bathymetry of Kapuche lake, and further discusses its formation process and lake type for being a glacial lake at the lowest elevation in Nepal Himalaya.

Zhangmu and Gyirong ports under the threat of glacial lake outburst flood

The Himalayas are prone to glacial lake outburst floods,which can pose a severe threat to downstream villages and infrastructure.The Zhangmu and Gyirong land treaty ports are located on the China-Nepal border in the central Himalayas.In recent years,the expansion of glacial lakes has increased the threat of these two port regions.This article describes the results of mapping the glacial lakes larger than 0.01 km^2 in the Zhangmu and Gyirong port regions and analyzes their change.It provides a comprehensive assessment of potentially dangerous glacial lakes and predicts the development of future glacial lakes.From 1988 to 2019,the glacial lakes in these port regions underwent"expansion",and moraine-dammed lakes show the most significant expansion trend.A total of eleven potentially dangerous glacial lakes are identified based on the assessment criteria and historical outburst events;most expanded by more than 150%from 1988 to 2019,with some by over 500%.The Cirenmaco,a moraine-dammed lake,is extremely prone to overtopping due to ice avalanches or the melting of dead ice in the dam.For other large lakes,such as the Jialongco,Gangxico and Galongco,ice avalanches may likely cause the lakes to burst besides self-destructive failure.The potential dangers of the Youmojianco glacial lakes,including lakes Nos.9,10 and 11,will increase in the future.In addition,the glacier-bed topography model predicts that 113 glacial lakes with a size larger than 0.01 km^2,a total area of 11.88 km2 and a total volume of 6.37×10^9 m^3 will form in the study area by the end of the 21 century.Due to global warming,the glacial lakes in the Zhangmu and Gyirong port regions will continue to grow in the short term,and hence the risk of glacial lake outburst floods will increase.

Limnology and ecology of lakes along the S?ya Coast, East Antarctica

The Soya Coast in East Antarctica has several ice-free areas where many small （〈1 km2） and shallow （〈50 m depth） glacial lakes display various limnological features. Geological, biological, and ecological studies conducted by the Japanese Antarctic Research Expeditions since 1957 are reviewed herein. Most of the lakes along the coast are oligotrophic; however, water quality is highly variable depending on differences in lake morphology and history. Geophysical and paleolimnological studies suggest that most of the lakes appeared after the Last Glacial Maximum （LGM） and have since maintained a lacustrine condition. The ubiquitous occurrence of benthic microbial assemblages with low phytoplankton biomasses is a common feature of other Antarctic lakes. However, diverse benthic assemblages such as moss pillars and large pinnacle microbial structures are found in the lake basins. Frequent and continuous limnological studies have revealed three typical water circulation patterns, underwater light climate features （too much light, which includes UV radiation during the ice free season）, and the structure of benthic assemblages based on their photosynthetic physiology. The phenomenon of mass floatation of benthic assemblages was observed in a lake during the ice-covered season; this was explained by seasonal environmental conditions. Thus, a hypothesis was formulated based on ecological matter cycling, eutrophication, and lake succession processes.

A framework of numerical simulation on moraine-dammed glacial lake outburst floods

Glacial outburst floods（GLOFs） in alpine regions tend to be relatively complicated, multi-stage catastrophes, capable of causing significant geomorphologic changes in channel surroundings and posing severe threats to infrastructure and the safety and livelihoods of human communities. GLOF disasters have been observed and potential hazards can be foreseen due to the newly formed glacial lakes or the expansion of existing ones in the Poiqu River Basin in Tibet, China. Here we presented a synthesis of GLOF-related studies including triggering mechanism（s）, dam breach modeling, and flood routing simulation that have been employed to reconstruct or forecast GLOF hydrographs. We provided a framework for probability-based GLOFs simulation and hazard mapping in the Poiqu River Basin according to available knowledge. We also discussed the uncertainties and challenges in the model chains, which may form the basis for further research.

Evaluation of effective spectral features for glacial lake mapping by using Landsat-8 OLI imagery

Glacial lake mapping provides the most feasible way for investigating the water resources and monitoring the flood outburst hazards in High Mountain Region.However,various types of glacial lakes with different properties bring a constraint to the rapid and accurate glacial lake mapping over a large scale.Existing spectral features to map glacial lakes are diverse but some are generally limited to the specific glaciated regions or lake types,some have unclear applicability,which hamper their application for the large areas.To this end,this study provides a solution for evaluating the most effective spectral features in glacial lake mapping using Landsat-8 imagery.The 23 frequently-used lake mapping spectral features,including single band reflectance features,Water Index features and image transformation features were selected,then the insignificant features were filtered out based on scoring calculated from two classical feature selection methods-random forest and decision tree algorithm.The result shows that the three most prominent spectral features(SF)with high scores are NDWI1,EWI,and NDWI3(renamed as SF8,SF19 and SF12 respectively).Accuracy assessment of glacial lake mapping results in five different test sites demonstrate that the selected features performed well and robustly in classifying different types of glacial lakes without any influence from the mountain shadows.SF8 and SF19 are superior for the detection of large amount of small glacial lakes,while some lake areas extracted by SF12 are incomplete.Moreover,SF8 achieved better accuracy than the other two features in terms of both Kappa Coefficient(0.8812)and Prediction(0.9025),which further indicates that SF8 has great potential for large scale glacial lake mapping in high mountainous area.

Moraine-dammed glacial lake changes during the recent 40 years in the Poiqu River Basin,Himalayas

Glacier retreat is not only a symbol of temperature and precipitation change, but a dominating factor of glacial lake changes in alpine regions, which are of wide concern for high risk of potential outburst floods. Of all types of glacial lakes, moraine-dammed lakes may be the most dangerous to local residents in mountain regions. Thus, we monitored the dy- namics of 12 moraine-dammed glacial lakes from 1974 to 2014 in the Poiqu River Basin of central west Himalayas, as well as their associated glaciers with a combination of remote sensing, topographic maps and digital elevation models （DEMs）. Our results indicate that all monitored moraine-dammed glacial lakes have expanded by 7.46 km2 in total while the glaciers retreated by a total of 15.29 km2 correspondingly. Meteorological analysis indicates a warming and drying trend in the Nyalam region from 1974 to 2014, which accelerated glacier retreat and then augmented the supply of moraine-dammed glacial lakes from glacier melt. Lake volume and water depth changed from 1974 to 2014 which indicates that lakes Kangxico, Galongco, and Youmojanco have a high potential for outburst floods and in urgent need for continuous moni- toring or artificial excavation to release water due to the quick increase in water depths and storage capacities. Lakes Jialongco and Cirenmaco, with outburst floods in 1981 and 2002, have a high potential risk for outburst floods because of rapid lake growth and steep slope gradients surrounding them.

Overview of an early warning system for Glacial Lake outburst flood risk mitigation in Dudh-Koshi Basin, Nepal

Natural disasters inflict severe damage on almost the entire spectrum of social and natural habitats. This ranges from housing and shelter, water, food, health, sanitation to information and communication networks, supply of power and energy,transportation infrastructure, and others. Nepal is a risk prone country for Glacial Lake Outburst Flood(GLOF). GLOFs exist as major challenges as they repeatedly cause a heavy toll of life and property. During such a disaster, major challenges are indeed the protection of life, property and vital life-supporting infrastructure. Any delay or laxity in disaster relief can escalate the magnitude of distress for the victims. Thus, rather than trying to take curative measures, it is better to minimize the impacts of GLOF. These measures subsequently help in reducing the magnitude of death and casualties due to a GLOF event. This reduction of impact is often achieved by optimizing preventive measures. For applying necessary deterrent measures, it is essential to disseminate information about the danger beforehand. Early Warning System(EWS) is an important step for such information dissemination for GLOF disaster management and helps to anticipate the risk of disaster and disseminate information to lives at risk. It is impossible and impractical to reduce all GLOF risks, but it is possible to reduce several impacts of a GLOF through the implementation of the EWS. This paper presents the design and implementation of an EWS for monitoring potential outbursts of a glacier lake in the Dudh-Koshi Basin, Nepal.

Thickness estimation of the Longbasaba Glacier:methods and application

A total of 71,177 glaciers exist on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau,according to the Randolph Glacier Inventory(RGI 6.0).Despite their large number,glacier ice thickness data are relatively scarce.This study utilizes digital elevation model data and ground-penetrating radar thickness measurements to estimate the distribution and variation of ice thickness of the Longbasaba Glacier using Glacier bed Topography(GlabTop),a full-width expansion model,and the Huss and Farinotti(HF)model.Results show that the average absolute deviations of GlabTop,the full-width expansion model,and the HF model are 9.8,15.5,and 10.9 m,respectively,indicating that GlabTop performs the best in simulating glacier thickness distribution.During 1980−2015,the Longbasaba Glacier thinned by an average of 7.9±1.3 m or 0.23±0.04 m/a,and its ice volume shrunk by 0.28±0.04 km3 with an average reduction rate of 0.0081±0.0001 km^3/a.In the investigation period,the area and volume of Longbasaba Lake expanded at rates of 0.12±0.01 km^2/a and 0.0132±0.0018 km3/a,respectively.This proglacial lake could potentially extend up to 5,000 m from the lake dam.

Can a dam type of an alpine lake be derived from lake geometry?A negative result

Glacial lake outburst floods(GLOFs)represent one of the most serious hazard and risk in deglaciating high mountain regions worldwide and the need for GLOF hazard and risk assessment is apparent.As a consequence,numerous region-and nation-wide GLOF assessment studies have been published recently.These studies cover large areas and consider hundreds to thousands of lakes,prioritizing the hazard posed by them.Clearly,certain simplification is required for executing such studies,often resulting in neglecting qualitative characteristics which would need manual assignment.Different lake dam types(e.g.,bedrock-dammed,moraine-dammed)are often not distinguished,despite they control GLOF mechanism(dam overtopping/dam breach)and thus GLOF magnitude.In this study,we explore the potential of easily measurable quantitative characteristics and four ratios to approximate the lake dam type.Our dataset of 851 lakes of the Cordillera Blanca suggests that while variances and means of these characteristics of individual lake types differ significantly(F-test,t-test),value distribution of different geometrical properties can’t be used for the originally proposed purpose along the spectra.The only promising results are obtained for extreme values(selected bins)of the ratios.For instance,the low width to length ratio indicates likely morainedammed lake while the high value of ratio indicating round-shape of the lake indicates increased likelihood of bedrock-dammed lake.Overall,we report a negative result of our experiment since there are negligible differences of relative frequencies in most of the bins along the spectra.

Snow disaster characteristics in Palongzangbu River Basinand mitigation countermeasures for road engineering

The Palongzangbu River Basin contains the highest number of maritime province glaciers in China. There are 130 glacial lakes, 64 snow avalanche sites and 28 glacial debris flow gullies distributed within the basin. Snow disasters play a controlling role in the Sichuan-Tibet Highway construction, due to the terrain’s special characteristics of high altitude and large height differential. Segmentation mitigation countermeasures for the Sichuan-Tibet Highway are presented based on snow disaster severity level and damage mode of the road. In the Ranwu to Midui section, snow avalanches are regional disasters, so the line should be placed in sunny slopes. In the Midui Gully to Yupu section, the line should be placed in shady slopes and at higher elevations to reduce the risk of glacial lake outburst. In the Yupu to Guxiang section, all three snow disasters are minimal. In the Guxiang to Tongmai section, glacier debris flows are the major threat, thus the road should be placed in shady slopes.

Glacier-Glacial Lake Interactions and Glacial Lake Development in the Central Himalaya,India(1994–2017)

Despite several regional glacier and glacier lake inventories, the relationship between receding glacier, glacial lake evolution(glacial-lake interactions) and their sensitivity to different forcing factors have not been properly understood yet. To better understand these processes, we used satellite images collected in 1994, 2015 and 2017 to monitor the spatially-explicit evolution of glacial lakes and glacier changes. The results show a total of 1 353 glacial lakes covering an area of 7.96 km;in the year 2015. Out of these, a total of 137 glacial lakes having an area of >0.01 km;and located within 2 km periphery of mother glacier have been selected for the monitoring of spatial development between 1994 and 2017. We found an increase in the total lake area from ~4.9 to ~7.73 km;between 1994 and 2017,corresponding to an overall expansion of ~57%. The total area covered by the glaciers associated with these lakes reduced from ~365 km;in 1994 to ~358 km^(2) in 2017, accounting for a glacier loss of ~7 km^(2) and corresponding to ~1.92% reduction. Our study results are in agreement with global glacier behavior, revealing a rapid glacier recession and accelerated glacial lake expansion under an unprecedented climate change scenario. In addition, the results suggest a significant reduction in the glacier area and a close relationship between the glacier melting and lake changes.

Glacial Lake Outburst Flood Disasters and Integrated Risk Management in China

High-risk areas for glacial lake outburst flood(GLOF) disasters in China are mainly concentrated in the middle-eastern Himalayas and Nyainqe?ntanglha(Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains), Tibetan Plateau. In the past 20 years, glaciers in these regions have retreated and thinned rapidly as a response to regional climate warming,leading to the formation of new glacial lakes and the expansion of existing glacial lakes. These areas are located in the border belt between the Indian and the Eurasian plates, where tectonic seismic activity is also frequent and intense. Earthquakes have often compromised the stability of mountain slopes, glaciers, and moraine dams, resulting in an imbalance in the state of glacial lakes and an increase of loose materials in valleys. It is foreseeable that the possibility of GLOFs and disaster occurrence will be great in the context of frequent earthquakes and continued climate warming. This article presents the temporal and spatial characteristics of GLOF disasters, as well as the conditions and mechanisms of GLOF disaster formation,and proposes an integrated risk management strategy to cope with GLOF disasters. It aims to facilitate the mitigation of the impacts of GLOF disasters on mountain economic and social systems, and improve disaster risk analysis, as well as the capability of risk management and disaster prevention and reduction.

为什么东天山冰川湖在加速扩张?

Monitoring alpine lakes is important for understanding the regional environmental changes caused by global warming.In this study,we provided a detailed analysis of alpine lake changes in the Tianshan Mountains(TS)and discussed their driving forces based on Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI,World View-2,Bing,Google Earth,and ASTER imagery,along with climatic data from 1990 to 2015.The results showed that during the study period,the total number and area of alpine lakes in the eastern TS exhibited an increasing trend,by 64.06%and 47.92%,respectively.Furthermore,the continuous expansion of glacial lakes contributed 95.12%and 94.17%to the total increase in the number and area,respectively,of alpine lakes.Non-glacial lakes exhibited only intermittent expansion.Since the 1990s,the new glacial lakes in the eastern TS have been mainly proglacial and extraglacial lakes.Over the past 25 years,eastern TS has experienced a temperature increase rate of 0.47℃/10a,which is higher than that in other TS regions.The rapidly warming climate and glacier recession are the primary causes of the accelerated expansion of glacial lakes in the eastern TS.

冰湖的界定与分类体系——面向冰湖编目和冰湖灾害研究（英文）

Glacial lakes are not only the important refresh water resources in alpine region, but also act as a trigger of many glacial hazards such as glacial lake outburst flood （GLOF） and debris flow. Therefore, glacial lakes play an important role on the cryosphere, climate change and alpine hazards. In this paper, the issues of glacial lake were systematically discussed, then from the view of glacial lake inventory and glacial lake hazards study, the glacial lake was defined as natural water mainly supplied by modern glacial meltwater or formed in glacier moraine＇s depression. Furthermore, a complete classification system of glacial lake was proposed based on its formation mechanism, topographic feature and geographical position. Glacial lakes were classified as 6 classes and 8 subclasses, i.e., glacial erosion lake （including cirque lake, gla- cial valley lake and other glacial erosion lake）, moraine-dammed lake （including end mo- raine-dammed lake, lateral moraine-dammed lake and moraine thaw lake）, ice-blocked lake （including advancing glacier-blocked lake and other glacier-blocked lake）, supraglacial lake, subglacial lake and other glacial lake. Meanwhile, some corresponding features exhibiting on remote sensing image and quantitative indices for identifying different glacial lake types were proposed in order to build a universal and operational classification system of glacial lake.