Abstract
ABSTRACTTo better understand the recent wide-scale changes in glacier coverage, we created and compared two glacier inventories covering eastern Nepal, based on aerial photographs (1992) and high-resolution Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) imagery (2006–10). The ALOS-derived inventory contained 1034 debris-free and 256 debris-covered glaciers with total and average areas of 440.2 ± 33.3 and 0.42 km2and 1074.4 ± 206.4 and 4.19 km2, respectively. We found that the debris-free glaciers have lost 11.2% (0.7 ± 0.1% a−1) of their area since 1992, whereas the number of glaciers increased by 5% because of fragmentation. The area change was significantly correlated by simple linear regression with minimum elevation (r= 0.30), maximum elevation (r= −0.18), altitudinal range (r= −0.50), glacier area (r= −0.62) and mean slope (r= 0.16), confirming that larger glaciers tended to lose a larger area (but a smaller percentage) than smaller glaciers. The intra-regional analysis of the glacier changes clearly showed higher shrinkage rates in the western massifs compared with the eastern massifs. In addition, 61 small glaciers covering an area of 2.4 km2have completely disappeared since 1992.
Highlights
Himalayan glaciers play a crucial role in regional water resources (Immerzeel and others, 2010) and are considered to be a climate indicator in high-altitude and mid-latitude regions (Gardelle and others, 2013), the response of debris-covered glaciers to climate change is poorly understood (Scherler and others, 2011)
We examined the dependency of the glacier area change on several topographical parameters
1290 glaciers covering 1515.6 ± 239.7 km2 were delineated from the 22 Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) images from 2006 to 2010
Summary
Himalayan glaciers play a crucial role in regional water resources (Immerzeel and others, 2010) and are considered to be a climate indicator in high-altitude and mid-latitude regions (Gardelle and others, 2013), the response of debris-covered glaciers to climate change is poorly understood (Scherler and others, 2011). In the Himalayas, glaciers have experienced generally negative trends in mass (Gardner and others, 2013), area (Cogley, 2016) and terminus position (Bolch and others, 2012), with glacier shrinkage exhibiting high-spatial variability (Fujita and Nuimura, 2011; Yao and others, 2012; Gardelle and others, 2013; Kääb and others, 2015). The Khumbu region in eastern Nepal Himalaya, with a large glacier extent at high altitude, has been investigated in terms of glacier area and volume changes, and its glaciers have shown substantial shrinkage during the past couple of decades (Bolch and others, 2008, 2011; Nuimura and others, 2012; Shangguan and others, 2014; Thakuri and others, 2014).
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