Projected loss of rock glacier habitat in the contiguous western United States with warming

Abstract

Rock glaciers support alpine biodiversity and may respond more slowly to warming than snow or glaciers. While responses of snow and glaciers to climate change are relatively well understood, a robust assessment of rock glacier environmental niche, future distributions of rock glaciers and potential for development of rock glaciers from current glaciers is lacking. Using process-relevant, high-resolution environmental descriptors, we develop a species distribution model of the topographic, geologic and hydroclimatic niche of rock glaciers that provides novel estimates of potential rock glacier distributions for different climates. We identify mean annual air temperature and headwall area as the dominant controls on rock glacier spatial distributions, with rock glaciers more likely to be found in areas with mean annual temperatures close to −5°C, little rain, northern aspects and broad headwalls. While rock glacier climate equilibration may take hundreds of years, we find that equilibration to present climate will result in a 50% reduction in rock glacier habitat and equilibration to late 21st-century climate under a high-end warming scenario will result in a 99% reduction in rock glacier habitat across the western USA. Under future conditions, we find limited potential for glacier to rock glacier transformation (3% of glacierized area), concentrated in cold, high elevation, moderate precipitation areas.