Investigating the Recent Surge in the Monomah Glacier, Central Kunlun Mountain Range with Multiple Sources of Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Several glaciers in the Bukatage Massif are surge-type. However, previous studies in this region focused on glacier area and length changes, and more information is needed to support the deep analysis of glacier surge. We determined changes in glacier thickness, motion, and surface features in this region based on TanDEM-X, ALOS/PRISM, Sentinel-1A, and Landsat images. Our results indicated that the recent surge of the Monomah Glacier, the largest glacier in the Bukatage Massif, started in early 2009 and ceased in late 2016. From 2009 to 2016, its area and length respectively increased by 6.27 km2 and 1.45 km, and its ice tongue experienced three periods of changes: side broadening (2009–2010), rapid advancing (2010–2013), and slow expansion (2013–2016). During 2000–2012, its accumulation zone was thinned by 50 m, while its ice tongue was thickened by 90 m. During 2015–2017, its flow velocity reduced from 1.2 to 0.25 m/d, and the summer velocities were much higher than winter velocities. We conclude that the recent Monomah Glacier surge is thermal-controlled. The subglacial temperature rose to the pressure-melting point because of substantial mass accumulation, and then the increased basal meltwater caused the surge.

Investigating the bias of TanDEM-X digital elevation models of glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau: impacting factors and potential effects on geodetic mass-balance measurements

“…Therefore, we masked the SPOT elevations in the areas with homogeneous scores (Holzer and others, 2015; Li and others, 2018). Finally, low-strength median filtering was applied to reduce the outliers (Guo and others, 2020b).…”

The Evolution of the Glacier Surges in the Tuanjie Peak, the Qilian Mountains

“…Another example of seasonal velocity changes during surges is documented in the West Kunlun Mountains, where winter speed-ups are also recorded [30]. In contrast, a gradual increase in summer velocities leading up to the surge of Monomah Glacier, Central Kunlun Mountain Range, was reported by Guo and others [62]. Although we only obtained seasonal velocity changes from four glaciers because of the availability of satellite data, the remaining glaciers also showed signals of winter initiation; for example, on 25 April 2002, the NE1 glacier clearly showed a ring-shaped terminal connected with the east branch (Figure 4).…”

Glacier changes in the Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve of China during 2000–2018

“…Combining with the first and second Chinese Glacier Inventory datasets, we explored the length change of these nine glaciers between 1970-2018. Some of the nine glaciers were classified as surge-glaciers in some studies (Yan et al, 2019;Guo et al, 2020;King et al, 2021), and their criteria include: (1) rapid advance of glacier terminus; (2) ve There are two well-known theories on the trigger mechanism of glacier surge: thermal control (Kamb, 1987) and hydrological control (Murray, 2003). However, these two mechanisms are summarized from field investigation in Alaska (Kamb et al, 1985) and Svalbard (Murray, 2003), the mechanism for surge-glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau are ambiguous (Paul, 2020).…”