A new study reveals that the mass loss of lake-terminating glaciers in the greater Himalaya has been significantly underestimated, due to the inability of satellites to see glacier changes occurring underwater, with critical implications for the region's future projections of glacier disappearance and water resources.
A new study reveals that the mass loss of lake-terminating glaciers in the greater Himalaya has been significantly underestimated, due to the inability of satellites to see glacier changes occurring underwater, with critical implications for the region's future projections of glacier disappearance and water resources.
Published in Nature Geoscience on April 3, the study was conducted by an international team including researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Graz University of Technology (Austria), the University of St. Andrews (UK), and Carnegie Mellon University (USA).
The researchers found that a previous assessment underestimated the total mass loss of lake-terminating glaciers in the greater Himalaya by 6.5%. The most significant underestimation of 10% occurred in the central Himalaya, where glacial lake growth was the most rapid. A particularly interesting case is Galong Co in this region, with a high underestimation of 65%.
This oversight was largely due to the limitations of satellite imaging in detecting underwater changes, which has led to a knowledge gap in our understanding of the full extent of glacier loss. From 2000 to 2020, proglacial lakes in the region increased by 47% in number, 33% in area, and 42% in volume. This expansion resulted in an estimated glacier mass loss of around 2.7 Gt, equivalent to 570 million elephants, or over 1,000 times the total number of elephants in the world. This loss was not considered by previous studies since the utilized satellite data can only measure the lake water surface but not underwater ice that is replaced by water.
Read more at Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters
Photo Credit: 12019 via Pixabay
