abstract a mountain glacier, when it occupies a river valley, immediately begins to change the cross-section and profile of that valley. river valleys in mountain areas tends to have v-shaped profiles. glaciers work to widen as well as deepen their valleys and the typical cross-section of a glacial valley is u-shaped. the u-shaped glacial valley is one of the most characteristic of glacial land...

With a unique eco-environmental system, the QinghaiTibet Plateau plays a fundamental role in safeguarding the local socioeconomic development and has an irreplaceable position in ensuring eco-environmental security in China and in the whole of Asia. Over the past 30 years, obvious climate change, predominantly global warming, has an extremely remarkable impact on the cryosphere of the plateau, ...

Observed fluctuations of mountain glaciers are known to be among the best indicators of climate change (e.g., IPCC, 2013). Continuous glacier monitoring is thus crucial and must include the repeated creation of glacier inventories (Haeberli, 2004) in order to understand observed glacier changes and project their future evolution (e.g., Hoelzle et al., 2007; Abermann et al., 2009; Huss, 2012). F...

Remote sensing in areas with extreme altitude differences is particularly challenging. In high mountain areas specifically, steep slopes result in reduced ground pixel resolution and degraded quality in the DEM. Exceptionally high brightness differences can in part no longer be imaged by the sensors. Nevertheless, detailed information about mountainous regions is highly relevant: time and again...

Quantifying the contribution of glacier runoff to water resources is particularly important in regions such as High Mountain Asia, where glaciers provide a large percentage of seasonal river discharge and support large populations downstream. In remote areas, direct field measurements of glacier melt rates are difficult to acquire and rarely observed, so hydro-glaciological modeling and remote ...

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate fluctuations. The effects of climate warming are for instance evident in the continuous retreat of glaciers. In the paper, the movement of the Dongkemadi Glacier in the Qinhai-Tibetan Plateau and the Keqicar Baxi glacier motion in the Tianshan Mountains of western China are measured using two-pass differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry ...

The Karakoram mountain range is well known for its numerous surge-type glaciers of which several have recently surged or are still doing so. Analysis of multi-temporal satellite images and digital elevation models have revealed impressive details about the related changes (e.g., in glacier length, surface elevation and flow velocities) and considerably expanded the database of known surge-type ...

A global overview of glacier advances and retreats (grouped by regions and by millennia) for the Holocene is compiled from previous studies. The reconstructions of glacier fluctuations are based on 1) mapping and dating moraines defined by 14C, TCN, OSL, lichenometry and tree rings (discontinuous records/time series), and 2) sediments from proglacial lakes and speleothems (continuous records/ t...