Identification of Potential Sites for Future Lake Formation and Expansion of Existing Lakes in Glaciers of Chandra Basin, Western Himalayas, India

Abstract

Disappearance of mountain glaciers and formation/expansion of glacial lakes are among the most distinguishable and dynamic impacts of climate warming in the Himalayas. The present research focuses on the identification of potential sites for future lake formation in the 65 selected study glaciers of Chandra basin located in the western Himalayas. The study adopted stress-driven, physics-based GlabTop2_IITB model to obtain the ice-thickness distribution, which was then used to extract the bedrock topography. Based on the overdeepenings determined from the derived glacier bed topographies, a total of 350 potential future glacial lakes (PFGLs) were identified, and a detailed highresolution database of these lakes was generated. The identified PFGLs were found to occupy an area of 49.56 km 2 , corresponding to 8.4% of the current total area of the 65 study glaciers (591 km 2). The total storage volume of these PFGLs was estimated as 1.08 ± 0.16 km 3. In our study region, 20 PFGLs were identified as potentially hazardous in the event of glacial lake outburst flood occurrence, and their combined storage volume was found to be more than 10 6 m 3 , which calls for continuous monitoring of the glaciers in this region.

Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Geodetic Mass Changes of Glaciers With Varying Debris Cover in the Pangong Region of Trans-Himalayan Ladakh, India Between 1990 and 2019

“…While the proglacial lake associated with G33723E78503N might not expand, there is a formation of a 1.06 ha lake in the midst of the ablation zone also evident on satellite data and Google Earth imagery of August 2013 and June 2016. It is pertinent to mention that the model has been tested in different glaciated regions of the European Alps (Linsbauer et al, 2012;Magnin et al, 2020) and Himalayas (Linsbauer et al, 2016;Pandit and Ramsankaran, 2020) including Trans-Himalayan Ladakh Majeed et al, 2021) for ice-thickness and glacier-bed overdeepenings. Given the prevailing glacier melt scenario over the seismically-active Jammu and Kashmir region, the development of new proglacial lakes and the formation of already existing ones would pose a significant glacial lake outburst (GLOF) risk to the downstream communities and infrastructure.…”

Testing the performance of ice thickness models to estimate the formation of potential future glacial lakes in Austria

“…We applied our modelling approach to detect GBOs within a mountain range dominated by mountain glaciers like cirque or niche glaciers. Previous studies focused on regions with much larger glaciers and a greater share of valley type glaciers, like the Himalayas, the Peruvian Andes or the Swiss Alps (Colonia et al, 2017;Frey et al, 2014;Kapitsa et al, 2017;Linsbauer et al, 2016;Pandit & Ramsankaran, 2020). In the Austrian Alps, more than 90% of the glaciers are cirque and niche glaciers and less than 8% of the glaciers can be classified as valley glaciers (Otto et al, 2018).…”

“…Recent developments in ice thickness models combined with highresolution glacier surface data led to the generation of approaches to simulate the future, ice-free bedrock topography below current glaciers (Frey et al, 2010b;Gharehchahi et al, 2020;Linsbauer et al, 2012;Pandit & Ramsankaran, 2020;.…”

“…This alternative requires a mostly manual classification of glacier morphology and thus does not allow predictions on large scales. Modelling of potential GBOs has been performed for selected mountain regions and even large ice shields (for example: Gharehchahi et al, 2020;Kapitsa et al, 2017;Linsbauer et al, 2013;Livingstone et al, 2013;Pandit & Ramsankaran, 2020;Viani et al, 2020).…”

“…Thus, GlabTop2 seems to be better suited for an assessment of GBOs in entire mountain ranges with a high number of glaciers. GlabTop and GlabTop2 have been applied to model potential GBOs in Switzerland (Linsbauer et al, 2012), the Himalaya-Karakorum region (Allen et al, 2016;Linsbauer et al, 2016;Pandit & Ramsankaran, 2020;Ramsankaran et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2019), the Djungarskiy Alatau, Kasachstan/China border (Kapitsa et al, 2017), the Peruvian Andes (Colonia et al, 2017, Drenkhan et al, 2019, the Mont Blanc Area (France, Magnin et al, 2020) and the Aosta Valley in Italy (Viani et al, 2020).…”