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Every year, climbers travel to the Himalayan mountains in hopes
of celebrating at the top of the world.
Sometimes referred to our planet's ‘third pole’, this region
holds some of the world’s most iconic and challenging terrain.
However, this landscape is changing.
Many of the glaciers on popular trekking routes have retreated
and given rise to new and larger glacial lakes.
Which typically form when glacial meltwater is blocked by ice dams or glacial sediment.
And worldwide, retreating glaciers have led to
an increase in the number and size of these glacial lakes.
Researchers, supported by NASA's High Mountain Asia Program, used new supercomputing abilities
and hundreds of thousands of Landsat satellite images
to catalogue and analyze three decades'
worth of glacial lake boundaries in the first-ever global study of its kind.
The study found that, during that period, global glacial lake volume increased ~48%.
The analysis concluded that, worldwide, smaller glacial lakes were growing at a more
rapid pace, and that lakes were occurring at higher elevations than previously documented.
This new assessment is a critical component to understanding how these growing lakes may
impact tourism, elevate hazard risk, and affect infrastructure for the communities living downstream.
And bring us one step closer to understanding
the global changes to our cryosphere.
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