Abstract
Global climate change is evidently manifest in disappearing mountain glaciers and receding and thinning ice sheet margins. Concern about contemporaneous proglacial lake development has spurred an emerging area of research seeking to quantitatively understand lake - glacier interactions. This perspectives article identifies spatio-temporal disparity between the coverage of field data, remote sensing observations and numerical modeling efforts. Throughout, an overview of the physical effects of lakes on glaciers and on ice sheet margins is provided, drawing evidence together from very recent and high-impact studies of both modern glaciology and of the Quaternary record. We identify and discuss six challenges for numerical modeling of lake - glacier interactions, namely that there are meltwater exchanges between glaciers and ice-marginal lakes, lake bathymetry and glacier bed topography are often unknown, lake - glacier interactions affect the longitudinal stress regime of glaciers, lake water temperature affects glacier melting but is very poorly constrained, the interactions persist with considerable spatio-temporal variability and with boundary migration, and data for model parameterization and validation is extremely scarce. Overall, we contend that numerical modeling is a key frontier in the cryospheric sciences to deliver process understanding of lake - glacier interactions.
Highlights
Proglacial lakes are increasing in number and areal extent globally (Carrivick and Tweed, 2013; Shugar et al, 2020)
We identify and discuss six challenges for numerical modeling of lake - glacier interactions, namely that there are meltwater exchanges between glaciers and ice-marginal lakes, lake bathymetry and glacier bed topography are often unknown, lake - glacier interactions affect the longitudinal stress regime of glaciers, lake water temperature affects glacier melting but is very poorly constrained, the interactions persist with considerable spatio-temporal variability and with boundary migration, and data for model parameterization and validation is extremely scarce
Many recent regional studies have concentrated on the Himalaya (e.g., Komori, 2008; King et al, 2018, 2019; Brun et al, 2019; Falaschi et al, 2019; Maurer et al, 2019; Tsutaki et al, 2019; Zhang et al, 2019; Kumar et al, 2020; Luo et al, 2020) partly due to the importance of glaciers there for water resources and partly due to the threat posed to downstream communities and infrastructure by glacial outburst floods (GLOFS) or “jökulhlaups” (Carrivick and Rushmer, 2006; Carrivick and Tweed, 2016; Dubey and Goyal, 2020; Thompson et al, 2020; Veh et al, 2020)
Summary
Proglacial lakes are increasing in number and areal extent globally (Carrivick and Tweed, 2013; Shugar et al, 2020). In recent Quaternary studies, ice-marginal lakes that formed immediately following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) have been investigated in great detail; across the Northern Hemisphere in Europe and Asia (e.g., Batchelor et al, 2019; Emery et al, 2019; Utting and Atkinson, 2019; Dalton et al, 2020; Herget et al, 2020; Winsemann and Lang, 2020; Turzewski et al, 2020), in Greenland (Carrivick et al, 2018; Adamson et al, 2019), in South America (e.g., Hall et al, 2019; Martin et al, 2019; Thorndycraft et al, 2019; Davies et al, 2020; Mendelová et al, 2020), and the Southern Alps of New Zealand (Sutherland et al, 2019a, b) Some of these lakes have been implicated in destabilizing ice sheets (Colman, 2002) and are thought to have been a control on ice stream onset and dynamics (Stokes and Clark, 2004; Perkins and Brennand, 2015). Where lakes freeze or have a floating terminus, a buttressing effect (Geirsdottir et al, 2008; Tsutaki et al, 2013; Mallalieu et al, 2020) can be imparted on the glacier, rather like that of an ice mélange in a marine setting
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