Terminus change of Kaskawulsh Glacier, Yukon, under a warming climate: retreat, thinning, slowdown and modified proglacial lake geometry

Abstract

Links between proglacial lakes and glacier dynamics are poorly understood but are necessary to predict how mountain glaciers will react to a warmer, wetter climate, where such lakes are expected to increase both in number and volume. Here, we examine a long-term (~120 year) record of terminus retreat, thinning and surface velocities from in-situ and remote sensing observations at the terminus of Kaskawulsh Glacier, Yukon, Canada, and determine the impact of a local proglacial hydrological reorganisation on glacier dynamics. After an initial deceleration during the late 1990s, terminus velocities increased at a rate of 3 m a−2 from 2000–12, while proglacial Slims Lake area increased simultaneously. The rapid drainage of the lake in May 2016 substantially altered the velocity profile, decreasing annual velocities by 48% within 3 km of the terminus between 2015 and 2021, at an average rate of ~ 12.5 m a−2. A key cause of the rapid drop in glacier motion was a reduction in flotation of the lower part of the glacier terminus after lake drainage. This has important implications for glacier dynamics and provides one of the first assessments of the impacts of a rapid proglacial lake drainage event on local terminus velocities.

GLAcier Feature Tracking testkit (GLAFT): A statistically- and physically-based framework for evaluating glacier velocity products derived from satellite image feature tracking

“…The Icefield Ranges Research Project set up a network of markers to track glacier motion during the 1960s, which concluded there were limited short-term variations in ice velocity (Holdsworth, 1969;Clarke, 2014). More recent work has focused on regional velocity patterns (Burgess et al, 2013;Abe and Furuya, 2015;Waechter et al, 2015;Van Wychen et al, 2018;Altena et al, 2019) and finds a multi-year acceleration near Kaskawulsh Glacier's terminus as a terminal lake grew from [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015]195 followed by a slowdown over the following five years after it drained in 2016 (Main et al, 2022). 3.1 Methods…”