Supraglacial debris thickness and supply rate in High-Mountain Asia
McCarthy, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8099-0531; Miles, E.; Kneib, M.; Buri, P.; Fugger, S.; Pellicciotti, F.. 2022 Supraglacial debris thickness and supply rate in High-Mountain Asia. Communications Earth & Environment, 3 (1), 269. 11, pp. 10.1038/s43247-022-00588-2
Before downloading, please read NORA policies.Preview |
Text (Open Access)
Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. s43247-022-00588-2.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract/Summary
Supraglacial debris strongly modulates glacier melt rates and can be decisive for ice dynamics and mountain hydrology. It is ubiquitous in High-Mountain Asia, yet because its thickness and supply rate from local topography are poorly known, our ability to forecast regional glacier change and streamflow is limited. Here we combined remote sensing and numerical modelling to resolve supraglacial debris thickness by altitude for 4689 glaciers in High-Mountain Asia, and debris-supply rate to 4141 of those glaciers. Our results reveal extensively thin supraglacial debris and high spatial variability in both debris thickness and supply rate. Debris-supply rate increases with the temperature and slope of debris-supply slopes regionally, and debris thickness increases as ice flow decreases locally. Our centennial-scale estimates of debris-supply rate are typically an order of magnitude or more lower than millennial-scale estimates of headwall-erosion rate from Beryllium-10 cosmogenic nuclides, potentially reflecting episodic debris supply to the region’s glaciers.
Item Type: | Publication - Article |
---|---|
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.1038/s43247-022-00588-2 |
ISSN: | 2662-4435 |
Date made live: | 18 Nov 2022 09:50 +0 (UTC) |
URI: | https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/531537 |
Actions (login required)
View Item |
Document Downloads
Downloads for past 30 days
Downloads per month over past year