Documenting glacial changes between 1910, 1970, 1992 and 2010 in theTurgenMountains,MongolianAltai, using repeat photographs, topographic maps, and satellite imagery

Abstract

The Turgen Mountains lie in northwestern Mongolia, roughly 80 km south of the Russian border. The area was visited in 1910 by a Royal Geographical Society expedition led by Douglas Carruthers. The party undertook an extensive survey of the range and also documented the extent of the glaciers with photographs. One hundred years later, in summer 2010, a US-Mongolian expedition retraced portions of the 1910 expedition. Camera locations were matched to the historical photographs and repeated photographs taken. In addition, the termini of the two main glacial lobes were surveyed by GPS. Analyses of field data, repeated photographs from 1910 and 2010, topographic maps from 1970, and satellite imagery from 1992 and 2010 were used to describe the changes in the glacial system. The results suggest that while the snow and ice volume on the summits appears to be intact, lower elevation glaciers show significant recession and ablation. From 1910 to 2010, West Turgen Glacier receded by c. 600 m and down-wasted by c. 70 m. This study successively demonstrates the utility of using historic expedition documents to extend the modern record of glacial change.

Present Glaciers and Their Dynamics in the Arid Parts of the Altai Mountains

“…Later, the glaciation of Mongolia was studied by Baast [30]. In the 21st century, the development of remote sensing, sometimes in combination with in situ observations, led to a number of new publications: [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] The Mongolian glaciers have been cataloged and mapped by Kamp et al [34,40]. Recently the glaciers of the region were included in the GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) database and the Randolph Glacier Inventory [34,41,42].…”

“…Recently the glaciers of the region were included in the GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) database and the Randolph Glacier Inventory [34,41,42]. The materials of the field observations were obtained for Turgen [33], Tavan Bogd, and Tsambagarav [37,43,44]. The first overview of the present glaciations of the arid Altai, including both the Russian and the Mongolian territory were given in our previous article [21].…”

“…In the Turgen massif, according to [33], the average rates of retreat of the West Turgen Glacier were 6.7 m·year −1 between 1910 and 1970, 3.9 m·year −1 between 1970 and 1992, and 6.1 m·year −1 between 1992 and 2010. Such rates of retreat are rather low compared with our data, but those are the average rates of long time periods; in shorter intervals, there are faster retreats and stabilizations.…”

Glacial geomorphology of the Altai and Western Sayan Mountains, Central Asia

“…Recent studies of contemporary glaciation in the Altai Mountains have focused upon individual mountain ranges and massifs (e.g. Kamp, McManigal, Dashtseren, & Walther, 2013). For example, Kamp et al (2013) estimated the total glacier coverage of the Ikh-Turgen massif ( Figure 2) as 31.8 km 2 .…”

Dynamical downscaling with COSMO and COSMO-CLM in the Sino-Mongolian Altai region

“…Information on the utilised data and the stations locations is given in Sect. 3.1 Dulamsuren et al 2014;Schluetz and Lehmkuhl 2007;Schwikowski et al 2009) and its impact on glaciers (Kamp et al 2013) and forests. Most tree ring-based past climate reconstruction studies in Western Mongolia (Davi et al 2015;Davi et al 2009) and north-western China (Chen et al 2012(Chen et al , 2014Zhang et al 2015) identified a significant climate and environmental change with rapid warming and precipitation increases caused by a general intensification of the global hydrological cycle.…”