Glacier area changes in Northern Eurasia

Abstract

Glaciers are widely recognized as key indicators of climate change. Recent evidence suggests an acceleration of glacier mass loss in several key mountain regions. Glacier recession implies landscape changes in the glacial zone, the origin of new lakes and activation of natural disaster processes, catastrophic mudflows, ice avalanches, outburst floods, etc. The absence or inadequacy of such information results in financial and human losses. A more comprehensive evaluation of glacier changes is imperative to assess ice contributions to global sea level rise and the future of water resources from glacial basins. One of the urgent steps is a full inventory of all ice bodies and their changes. The first estimation of glacier state and glacier distribution on the territory of the former Soviet Union has been done in the USSR Glacier Inventory (UGI) published in 1965-1982. The UGI is based on topographic maps and air photos and reflects the status of the glaciers in the 1940s-1970s. There is information about 28 884 glaciers with an area of 7830.75 km 2 in the inventory. It covers 25 glacier systems in Northern Eurasia. In the 1980s the UGI has been transformed into digital form as a part of the World Glacier Inventory (WGI). Recent satellite data provide a unique opportunity to look again at these glaciers and to evaluate changes in glacier extent for the second part of the 20th century. About 15 000 glacier outlines for the Caucasus, Polar Urals, Pamir Alay, Tien Shan, Altai, Kamchatka and Russian Arctic have been derived from ASTER and Landsat imagery and can be used for glacier change evaluation. Results of the analysis indicate the steady trend in glacier shrinkage in all mountain regions for the second part of the 20th century. Glacier area loss for the studied regions varies from 13% (Tien Shan) to 22.3% (Polar Urals). The common driver, most likely, is an increase in summer air temperature. There is also a very large variability in the degree of individual glacier degradation, very much depending on the morphology and local meteorological conditions.

The Greater Caucasus Glacier Inventory (Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan)

“…The current investigation revealed that he missed some small glaciers, particularly in the Bzipi, Kodori, Rioni, Enguri and Tergi (Terek) river basins. Khromova et al (2009Khromova et al ( , 2014 used manually digitized results to estimate changes of more than 1200 glaciers in the Caucasus in two periods : 1911-1957 and 1957-2000. They found that glacier area decreased from 1911 to 1957 by 24.7 % (0.52 % yr −1 ) and from 1957 to 2000 by 17.7 % (0.41 % yr −1 ). Elbrus glaciers lost 14.8 % (0.31 % yr −1 ) and 6.3 % (0.14 % yr −1 ) respectively for the two time periods.…”

Re-establishing glacier monitoring in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Central Asia

“…In the recent past, results of glacier monitoring activities in Central Asia (except Kazhakstan and China) are mainly based on remote sensing techniques with a focus on geodetic area and volume change assessments (see Table 4) or front variation measurements (Aizen et al, 2007;Konovalov and Desinov, 2007;Niederer et al, 2007;Haritashya et al, 2009;Kääb et al, 2015;Narama et al, 2010;Hagg et al, 2013;Kriegel et al, 2013;Gardelle et al, 2013;Gardner et al, 2013;Ozmonov et al, 2013;Pieczonka et al, 2013;Khromova et al, 2014;Pieczonka and Bolch, 2015;Farinotti et al, 2015;Petrakov et al, 2016). Between 1994 and 1998, most of the in situ glacier observation programmes were discontinued.…”

Rapid glacial retreat on the Kamchatka Peninsula during the early 21st century

“…1). The first attempts to estimate the extent of the region's glaciers were published as part of the "Catalogue of Glaciers in the USSR, volume 20" (Vinogradov, 1968;Khromova et al, 2014). This was based on observations from topographic maps and aerial imagery captured in the early 1950s (various years), supplemented by field studies (Kotlyakov, 1980).…”

“…The Kamchatka Peninsula is of particular interest because investigation of its recent glacial history has been limited (cf. Khromova et al, 2014;Earl and Gardner, 2016), despite being the largest glacierised area in NE Asia (Solomina et al, 2007) and a region where glaciers, climate and active volcanoes currently interact (Barr and Solomina, 2014).…”