TY - JOUR
T1 - More dynamic than expected
T2 - An updated survey of surging glaciers in the Pamir
AU - Goerlich, Franz
AU - Bolch, Tobias
AU - Paul, Frank
N1 - Funding Information:
Financial support. This research has been supported by ESA (grant nos. 4000109873/14/I-NB and 4000127593/19/I-NB) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant no. XDA20100300).
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. The work of Franz Goerlich and Frank Paul was supported by the ESA projects Glaciers_cci (4000109873/14/I-NB) and Glaciers_cci+ (4000127593/19/I-NB), and the work of Tobias Bolch was partially supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA20100300). The AW3D30 DEM is provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/aw3d30/index. htm, last access: 20 March 2020) © JAXA. All Corona, Hexagon and Landsat images used in this study were provided by USGS and downloaded from https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov. We thank Philipp Rastner for supporting us in calculating the topographic parameters for several states of the inventory, Kriti Mukherjee for providing the Hexagon DEMs from 1975 and Horst Machguth for providing the centre lines for the determination of glacier length and length changes. We thank Luke Copland and the second anonymous reviewer for their conscientious work to improve this study.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/3
Y1 - 2020/12/3
N2 - The investigation of surging glaciers using remote sensing has recently seen a strong increase as freely available satellite data and digital elevation models (DEMs) can provide detailed information about surges that often take place in remote and inaccessible regions. Apart from analysing individual surges, satellite information is increasingly used to collect valuable data on surging glaciers. Related inventories have recently been published for several regions in High Mountain Asia including the Karakoram or parts of the Pamir and western Kunlun Shan, but information for the entire Pamir is solely available from a historic database listing about 80 glaciers with confirmed surges. Here we present an updated inventory of confirmed glacier surges for the Pamir that considers results from earlier studies and is largely based on a systematic analysis of Landsat image time series (1988 to 2018), very high-resolution imagery (Corona, Hexagon, Bing Maps, Google Earth) and DEM differences. Actively surging glaciers (e.g. with advancing termini) were identified from animations and flicker images and the typical elevation change patterns (lowering in an upper reservoir zone and thickening further down in a receiving zone). In total, we identified 206 spatially distinct surges within 186 glacier bodies mostly clustered in the northern and western part of the Pamir. Where possible, minimum and maximum glacier extents were digitised, but often interacting tributaries made a clear separation challenging. Most surging glaciers (n D 70) are found in the larger size classes (> 10 km2), but two of them are very small (< 0.5 km2). We also found several surges where the length of the glacier increased by more than 100 %. The created datasets are available at: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.914150 (Goerlich et al., 2020).
AB - The investigation of surging glaciers using remote sensing has recently seen a strong increase as freely available satellite data and digital elevation models (DEMs) can provide detailed information about surges that often take place in remote and inaccessible regions. Apart from analysing individual surges, satellite information is increasingly used to collect valuable data on surging glaciers. Related inventories have recently been published for several regions in High Mountain Asia including the Karakoram or parts of the Pamir and western Kunlun Shan, but information for the entire Pamir is solely available from a historic database listing about 80 glaciers with confirmed surges. Here we present an updated inventory of confirmed glacier surges for the Pamir that considers results from earlier studies and is largely based on a systematic analysis of Landsat image time series (1988 to 2018), very high-resolution imagery (Corona, Hexagon, Bing Maps, Google Earth) and DEM differences. Actively surging glaciers (e.g. with advancing termini) were identified from animations and flicker images and the typical elevation change patterns (lowering in an upper reservoir zone and thickening further down in a receiving zone). In total, we identified 206 spatially distinct surges within 186 glacier bodies mostly clustered in the northern and western part of the Pamir. Where possible, minimum and maximum glacier extents were digitised, but often interacting tributaries made a clear separation challenging. Most surging glaciers (n D 70) are found in the larger size classes (> 10 km2), but two of them are very small (< 0.5 km2). We also found several surges where the length of the glacier increased by more than 100 %. The created datasets are available at: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.914150 (Goerlich et al., 2020).
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097401266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5194/essd-12-3161-2020
DO - 10.5194/essd-12-3161-2020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097401266
SN - 1866-3508
VL - 12
SP - 3161
EP - 3176
JO - Earth System Science Data
JF - Earth System Science Data
IS - 4
M1 - 170
ER -