Abstract
Most glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau are retreating, and glacier melt has been emphasized as the dominant driver for recent lake expansions on the Tibetan Plateau. By investigating detailed changes in lake extents and levels across the Tibetan Plateau from Landsat/ICESat data, we found a pattern of dramatic lake changes from 1970 to 2010 (especially after 2000) with a southwest-northeast transition from shrinking, to stable, to rapidly expanding. This pattern is in distinct contrast to the spatial characteristics of glacier retreat, suggesting limited influence of glacier melt on lake dynamics. The plateau-wide pattern of lake change is related to precipitation variation and consistent with the pattern of permafrost degradation induced by rising temperature. More than 79% of lakes we observed on the central-northern plateau (with continuous permafrost) are rapidly expanding, even without glacial contributions, while lakes fed by retreating glaciers in southern regions (with isolated permafrost) are relatively stable or shrinking. Our study shows the limited role of glacier melt and highlights the potentially important contribution of permafrost degradation in predicting future water availability in this region, where understanding these processes is of critical importance to drinking water, agriculture, and hydropower supply of densely populated areas in South and East Asia.
Highlights
Rising temperature as a component of climate change has caused most glaciers worldwide to retreat [1,2]
The Tibetan Plateau contains .1,000 lakes, most of which belong to inland drainage systems [8], so their dynamics represent integrated effects of climate and associated cryospheric changes within their drainage basins
Our results reveal a distinct southwestnortheast spatio-temporal pattern of lake inter-annual changes across the Tibetan Plateau in 1972–2010 from shrinking, to stable, to rapidly expanding (Fig. 1)
Summary
Rising temperature as a component of climate change has caused most glaciers worldwide to retreat [1,2]. Huang et al (2011) [34] investigated lake extent changes in the source areas of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau based on three time slices of Landsat images in the 1970s, early 1990s, and around 2004. They founded a widespread declining trend in lake abundance and area in the whole headwater basin of the Yellow River and the southeastern headwaters of the Yangtze River, but lake expansions occurred in the western and northern headwaters of the Yangtze River. The coarse temporal resolution prevented the identification of rapid/slow phases of lake changes and potential spatio-temporal transitions in lake changes
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