Abstract

Recent studies of Asian glaciers have shown that glaciers in eastern Karakoram and West Kunlun have been slightly gaining mass while those in nearby Jammu Kashmir and Himalayas are losing mass, at rates of more than 0.5 m w.e.yr−1 and about 0.3 m w.e.yr−1, respectively. Two possible explanations have been proposed for this difference in glacier behaviour: spatial heterogeneity in climate change (climatic forcing) or differing glacier responses to climate change (glacier response). However, neither explanation has strong supporting evidence. Here, we examine the glacial response by calculating the mass-balance sensitivity to temperature change in high-mountain Asia. In support of the glacier-response explanation, we find a strong correlation between observed glacier surface-elevation changes and mass-balance sensitivity of glaciers. The high coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.61) suggests that spatially heterogeneous mass-balance sensitivity has more explanatory power than regionally different climate change for the recent contrasting glacier fluctuations in the high mountain Asia.

Highlights

  • In recent years, shrinking glaciers have contributed to about 30% of global sea level rise[1]

  • The resulting mass-balance sensitivity to air temperature (MBS) distribution (Fig. 1c) is similar to the distribution of trends in elevation change (TEC) obtained from remotely sensed laser altimetry observations of glacier surfaces (Fig. 1a and b)

  • We compared the relationship with the TEC dataset over a wider region from ref.[1] (Fig. 1b) for two cases: limited to the same domain as in ref.[2] and the entirety of high mountain Asia (HMA); we obtained lower, though consistent, correlations (R2 = 0.17 for the ref.[2] domain and R2 = 0.19 for HMA)

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Summary

Introduction

In recent years, shrinking glaciers have contributed to about 30% of global sea level rise[1]. Recent studies[1,2,3,4,5] using altimetry and repeat DEMs demonstrated that glaciers in the Himalayas and Hengduan Shan are losing mass, whereas glaciers in the Karakoram and West Kunlun are slightly gaining mass (Fig. 1a and b) The growth of the latter glaciers, called the ‘Karakoram anomaly’[6], has been attributed to cooling summer temperatures and increasing winter precipitation[7,8]. The seasonality of precipitation, which varies widely over the HMA region, will affect the mass-balance sensitivity of glaciers[16,17,18,19,20] These studies suggest that glaciers can undergo different mass changes even under uniform climate change. The MBS calculation incorporated an energy- and mass-balance model[17] that used optimized precipitation for each region as input[19] (see Methods)

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