Abstract

Understanding climate-glacier dynamics in High Mountain Asia is of critical importance to address issues including water resources, sea-level rise, mountain geodynamics, natural hazards and ecosystem sustainability. The Karakoram Himalaya is arguably the least understood region, given its extreme topography, climate-system coupling, and advancing and surge-type glaciers that exhibit complex flow patterns. Glacier fluctuations in the Karakoram Himalaya are highly variable in space and time because of numerous controlling factors, including the westerlies, the Indian summer monsoon, various teleconnections, topographic effects, glacier debris-cover characteristics, glacier dynamics, and geological conditions. The influence of the integrative coupling of forcing factors, however, has not been adequately assessed for characterizing the glaciers in the Karakoram Himalaya. Given the scarcity of in-situ data and the difficulty of conducting fieldwork on these glaciers, recent research has focused on utilizing remote sensing, geospatial technologies, and scientific modeling to obtain baseline information about the state of glaciers in the region. This review summarizes our current knowledge of glaciers, climate-glacier interaction, and topographic forcing in the Karakoram Himalaya, and demonstrates the complexities in mountain geodynamics that influence climate-glacier dynamics. Innovative analysis is also presented in support of our review and discussion.

Highlights

  • Various Earth systems are in a state of transition due to climate change, and this has resulted in ecosystem migration, an increase in natural hazards, and water resource issues [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

  • Given the complexity and uncertainties associated with numerous aspects of climate-glacier dynamics and surface processes, the purpose of this article is to review our current understanding of climate-glacier dynamics in the Karakoram Himalaya; a region of known spatial anomalies related to climate, surface processes, tectonics and glacier fluctuations

  • We identify numerous concepts and issues associated with understanding complex dynamics, and provide insights into how the glaciers in this region may be responding to climate change from a mountain geodynamics perspective

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Summary

Introduction

Various Earth systems are in a state of transition due to climate change, and this has resulted in ecosystem migration, an increase in natural hazards, and water resource issues [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Most of these glaciers are heavily debris-covered and avalanche-fed, and some of them appear to be departing from the global trend of recession [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. A controversial and incorrect statement about the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by the year

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