Spatiotemporal variability of surface velocities of monsoon temperate glaciers in the Kangri Karpo Mountains, southeastern Tibetan Plateau

Kunpeng Wu,Zongli Jiang,Yu Zhu,Junfeng Wei,Qiao Liu,Junli Xu,Shiyin Liu

doi:10.1017/jog.2020.98

Abstract

AbstractInfluenced by the Indian monsoon, the Kangri Karpo Mountains (KKM) of the southeastern Tibetan Plateau is the most humid part of the plateau, and one of the most important regions with numerous monsoon temperate glaciers. Glacier mass balance estimates have been strongly negative in the KKM over recent decades, but the spatiotemporal characteristics of surface velocity are poorly understood. Using phase-correlation feature tracking on Landsat images, this study estimates spatiotemporal variabilities of monsoon temperate glaciers for the period of 1988–2019. Results show that a significant slowdown was observed below an elevation of 4900 m, while an accelerated ice flow was found at an elevation of 4900–5800 m over the past 30 years. The trend of slowdown was −0.1 m a−1dec−1during 1988–2000, and then it increased to −0.5 m a−1dec−1during 2001–2019.

Highlights

The environment of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) has experienced rapid warming over the past several decades, which has caused glacier retreat and mass loss (Bolch and others, 2012; Yao and others, 2012)
We present the spatiotemporal characteristics of glacier surface velocity in the eastern part of the Kangri Karpo Mountains (KKM: Fig. 1), Nyainqentanglha Range, over the period of 1988–2019
The surface velocity of the KKM reached a mean of ∼70 ± 28 m a−1 and a maximum of ∼690 ± 25 m a−1 over the past 30 years (Table S2)

Summary

Introduction

The environment of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) has experienced rapid warming over the past several decades, which has caused glacier retreat and mass loss (Bolch and others, 2012; Yao and others, 2012). Based on TerraSAR-X data and published Landsat velocities, an average slowdown of 51% was found between 1999/2003 and 2013/2014 in the eastern Nyainqentanglha Range (Neckel and others, 2017) While this pronounced change in ice flow came from five debris-covered valley glaciers, it does not represent large-scale glacier response to climate warming. Mass-balance estimates have been strongly negative in southeastern Tibet over recent decades, and a number of velocity measurements have been made for monsoon temperate glaciers (Zhang and others, 2010; Neckel and others, 2017; Dehecq and others, 2019), but we know little about their spatiotemporal variations with large-scale spatial coverage. In this study, we attempt to observe the spatiotemporal characteristics of monsoon temperate glacier surface velocity

Methods

Results

Conclusion