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Glacial lakes exacerbate Himalayan glacier mass loss

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King_2019_SR_Glaciallakes_CC.pdf (4.003Mb)
Date
02/12/2019
Author
King, Owen
Bhattacharya, Atanu
Bhambri, Rakesh
Bolch, Tobias
Keywords
Glacier
Himalaya
G Geography (General)
NDAS
BDC
R2C
SDG 15 - Life on Land
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Abstract
Heterogeneous glacier mass loss has occurred across High Mountain Asia on a multi-decadal timescale. Contrasting climatic settings influence glacier behaviour at the regional scale, but high intra-regional variability in mass loss rates points to factors capable of amplifying glacier recession in addition to climatic change along the Himalaya. Here we examine the influence of surface debris cover and glacial lakes on glacier mass loss across the Himalaya since the 1970s. We find no substantial difference in the mass loss of debris-covered and clean-ice glaciers over our study period, but substantially more negative (-0.13 to -0.29 m w.e.a-1) mass balances for lake-terminating glaciers, in comparison to land-terminating glaciers, with the largest differences occurring after 2000. Despite representing a minor portion of the total glacier population (~10 %), the recession of lake-terminating glaciers accounted for up to 32 % of mass loss in different sub-regions. The continued expansion of established glacial lakes, and the preconditioning of land-terminating glaciers for new lake development increases the likelihood of enhanced ice mass loss from the region in coming decades; a scenario not currently considered in regional ice mass loss projections.
Citation
King , O , Bhattacharya , A , Bhambri , R & Bolch , T 2019 , ' Glacial lakes exacerbate Himalayan glacier mass loss ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 9 , 18145 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53733-x
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53733-x
ISSN
2045-2322
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
This study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. IZLCZ2_169979/1) the Dragon 4 project funded by ESA (4000121469/17/I-NB) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA20100300).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/19054

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