A holistic view of Shisper Glacier surge and outburst floods: from physical processes to downstream impacts

Abstract

We observed the surge velocity, terminus advance, lake formation and outburst, as well as its downstream impacts at Shisper Glacier in the Karakoram, Pakistan and suggest potential naturebased risk-reduction solutions. A recent surge started in late 2017 with increased velocity since April 2018 and a resulting terminus advance from June 2018. Bi-modal peak velocity of 19.2 ± 0.16 m/ day was observed in April-May 2018 and May-June 2019. Also, the terminus advance blocked the river from the adjacent Muchuhar Glacier repeatedly since November 2018. Lake outbursts were observed in June 2019 and April 2020. Relying on observations of the lake area and peak discharge of 142 m 3 s À1 in 2019 and 85 m 3 s À1 April 2020, outburst were simulated using the BASEMENT software. Simulations and field observations show that even at high discharge, damages were mainly observed along the main river channel, causing strong bank erosion rather than widespread inundation of land. The ice-dammed lake is potentially hazardous until the blocked stream completely disappears in future. Our results suggest that the biggest lake outburst hazard lies in its erosion potential with damages to infrastructure closest to the river and large sediments transport to the downstream Hunza River.

A comprehensive and version-controlled database of glacial lake outburst floods in High Mountain Asia

“…Lakes linked to GLOFs often exhibit rapid areal changes in the weeks and days prior to eventual failure of the dam or opening of a tunnel. This is especially true for ephemeral ice-dammed lakes (Muhammad et al, 2021;Round et al, 2017;Steiner et al, 2018). Therefore, the lake area mapped many weeks or even months before a drainage event is not necessarily a good proxy for the actual water volume that drained.…”

Progress and challenges in glacial lake outburst flood research (2017–2021): a research community perspective

“…Tens of individual GLOF events have been reported since 2017 in different parts of the world including the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya (Byers et al, 2019;Yin et al, 2019;Khan et al, 2021;Maharjan et al, 2021;Muhammad et al, 2021), the Tien Shan (Dayirov and Narama, 2020), the Tibetan Plateau (Zheng et al, 2021b), the Tropical Andes (Vilca et al, 2021;Emmer et al, 2022), the Southern Andes (Anyia et al, 2020;Vandekerkhove et al, 2021), the European Alps (Troilo, 2021;Ogier et al, 2021;Stefaniak et al, 2021), Alaska (Kienholz et al, 2020;Abdel-Fattah et al, 2021), British Columbia (Geertsema et al, 2022), Greenland (Tomczyk et al, 2021) and Scandinavia (Andreassen et al, 2022). Recently, Veh et al (2022) compiled globally by far the most complete GLOF inventory (total of >2800 GLOFs until March 2022; available from http://glofs.geoecology.…”

Global clustering of recent glacier surges from radar backscatter data, 2017–2022

“…The mechanisms of glacier surging and the conditions leading to it are still incompletely understood and the topic of a substantial body of past and ongoing research (Harrison and Post, 2003; Jiskoot, 2011; Sevestre and Benn, 2015; Benn and others, 2019; Thogersen and others, 2019; Truffer and others, 2021). Glacier surges can cause significant natural hazards, mostly through damming-up of rivers and thus causing outburst-flood hazards during their advance, but also due to direct inundation of land and damage of mountain infrastructure (Bevington and Copland, 2014; Round and others, 2017; Steiner and others, 2018; Hock and others, 2019; Muhammad and others, 2021; Truffer and others, 2021). The initiation of catastrophic low-angle glacier detachments and their huge ice-rock avalanches also appears to be connected to surge-type processes (Kääb and others, 2018; Jacquemart and others, 2020; Kääb and others, 2021).…”