NASA Finds Asian Glaciers Slowed by Ice Loss

A NASA-led, international study finds Asia's high mountain glaciers are flowing more slowly in response to widespread ice loss, affecting freshwater availability downstream in India, Pakistan and China.

Glaciers in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, one of the mountain regions studied in the new research. Credit: Université Grenoble Alpes/IRD/Patrick Wagnon

Researchers analyzed almost 2 million satellite images of the glaciers and found that 94 percent of the differences in flow rates could be explained by changes in ice thickness.

For more than a decade, satellite data have documented that the glaciers were thinning as the melt rates on their top surfaces increased. However, it has not been entirely clear how these glaciers are responding to this ice loss. The rate at which they will disappear in the future depends on how they adjust to a warming climate.

Asia's mountain glaciers flow from the cold heights of the world's tallest mountains down to warmer climate zones, where they melt much faster, feeding major rivers such as the Indus and Yangtze.

Scientists need to understand what is regulating the glaciers' flow speeds to project how glacial meltwater will contribute to the region's water resources and to sea level rise. Observing the glaciers from ground level is difficult because of their huge geographic expanse and inaccessibility, so the researchers turned to satellite images.

The researchers developed algorithms to analyze almost 2 million pairs of U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat satellite images from 1985 to 2017. The algorithms enabled automatic feature tracking to measure the distance that distinctive spots on the glaciers, such as crevasses or patches of dirt, traveled between an earlier and a later image.

What's surprising about this study is that the relationship between thinning and flow speed is so consistent. In the few locations where glaciers have been stable or thickening rather than thinning, the study found that flow speeds also have been increasing slightly.

The reason a glacier flows down a slope at all is because gravity pulls on its mass. The pull makes a glacier both slide on its base and deform, or "creep" - a slow movement caused by ice crystals slipping past one another under the pressure of the glacier's weight. As the glacier thins and loses mass, both sliding and creeping become more difficult, and the glacier's flow slows as a result.

However, other factors also affect a glacier's rate of flow, such as whether water is lubricating the glacier's base so that it can slide more easily. Scientists were unsure of the relative importance of these different factors. The new study shows that ice thickness far outweighs any other factor in regulating flow speed over the long term. (NASA)

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