Abstract
Glacial lake formations are currently being observed in the majority of glacierized mountains in the world. Given the ongoing climate change and population increase, studying glacier ice thickness and bed topography is a necessity for understanding the erosive power of glacier activity in the past and lake formation in the future. This study uses the available information to predict potential sites for future lake formation in the Upper Rhône catchment located in the Southwestern Swiss Alps. The study integrates the latest available glacier outlines and high-quality digital elevation models (DEMs) into the Volume and Topography Automation (VOLTA) model to estimate ice thickness within the extent of the glaciers. Unlike the previous ice thickness models, VOLTA calculates ice thickness distribution based on automatically-derived centerlines, while optimizing the model by including the valley side drag parameter in the force equation. In this study, a total ice volume of 37.17 ± 12.26 km3 (1σ) was estimated for the Upper Rhône catchment. The comparison of VOLTA performance indicates a stronger relationship between measured and predicted bedrock, confirming the less variability in VOLTA’s results (r2 ≈ 0.92) than Glacier Bed Topography (GlabTop) (r2 ≈ 0.82). Overall, the mean percentage of ice thickness error for all measured profiles in the Upper Rhône catchment is around ±22%, of which 28 out of 42 glaciers are underestimated. By incorporating the vertical accuracy of free-ice DEM, we could identify 171 overdeepenings. Among them, 100 sites have a high potential for future lake formation based on four morphological criteria. The visual evaluation of deglaciated areas also supports the robustness of the presented methodology, as 11 water bodies were already formed within the predicted overdeepenings. In the wake of changing global climate, such results highlight the importance of combined datasets and parameters for projecting the future glacial landscapes. The timely information on future glacial lake formation can equip planners with essential knowledge, not only for managing water resources and hazards, but also for understanding glacier dynamics, catchment ecology, and landscape evolution of high-mountain regions.
Highlights
High-mountain regions are dominated by glacial and periglacial processes which are mainly governed by climate conditions [1]
We focus on the ice thicknesses and volumes derived from Volume and Topography Automation (VOLTA)
The results show that VOLTA has mainly underestimated the glacier ice thickness compared to ITEM, and this underestimation is higher for larger and less steep glaciers
Summary
High-mountain regions are dominated by glacial and periglacial processes which are mainly governed by climate conditions [1]. One of the widely observed signs of climate change and ice loss has been the transformation of glaciers into a new landscape of rocks, debris, ice-debris complexes, and most importantly glacial lakes [7,8,9,10,11] The combination of these features can form a highly dynamic and hazardous condition for the downslope settlements (e.g., Glacier Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs)) [12,13,14,15,16,17]. The formation of proglacial lakes can affect the stability of mountain glaciers and can partly disengage glacier behavior from climatic perturbations, with such processes having occurred during previous phases of deglaciation [18] Despite their hazardous nature, the newly emerging proglacial lakes and ice-free basins have the potential to serve as geo-tourism attraction sites or water reservoirs for energy production [19,20,21,22]. Understanding lake formation and modeling the potential location of future lakes has become a necessity for timely water resource and hazard management in high mountain regions, and for glaciological and ecological research concerning the reconstruction of ice motion, landscape evolution [18,23,24], and high-mountain biodiversity [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], respectively
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