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Nearly freezing and often an otherworldly shade of blue, glacial lakes form as glaciers melt and retreat. These lakes are a source of drinking and irrigation water for many communities. But they can turn deadly in an instant when the rocks that hold them in place shift and send torrents of water coursing downstream. Now, researchers have compiled the first global database of glacial lakes and found that they increased in volume by nearly 50 percent over the last few decades. That growth, largely fueled by climate change, means that such floods will likely strike more frequently in the future, the team concluded in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change. Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues did not set out to take a global census of glacial lakes. They had originally planned to focus on only a few dozen concentrated in the Himalayas and neighboring mountain ranges in East and South Asia. But when the team finished writing computer programs to automatically identify and outline water in satellite images, they realized they could easily expand their study to include most of the world’s glacial lakes. “It wasn’t that much of a bigger leap,” Dr. Shugar said. The researchers collected more than 250,000 Landsat images of the Earth’s surface and fed that satellite imagery into Google Earth Engine, a platform for analyzing large Earth science data sets, to assemble the most complete glacial lake inventory to date. “We mapped almost the whole world,” Dr. Shugar said. Image A controlled exit channel for adjusting water levels on Imja Lake, near Mount Everest in Nepal.Credit...Prakash Mathema/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images This study demonstrates cloud computing’s capabilities, said David Rounce, a glaciologist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the research. “Being able to churn through over 200,000 images is really remarkable.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/science/global-warming-glacial-lakes.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=false&req_id=284932658&algo=identity&imp_id=619070864&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/science/global-warming-glacial-lakes.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=false&req_id=284932658&algo=identity&imp_id=619070864&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage)

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Shwemoe

@Shwemoe67475263 • 4 Years Ago

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Nearly freezing and often an otherworldly shade of blue, glacial lakes form as glaciers melt and retreat. These lakes are a source of drinking and irrigation water for many communities. But they can turn deadly in an instant when the rocks that hold them in place shift and send torrents of water coursing downstream. Now, researchers have compiled the first global database of glacial lakes and found that they increased in volume by nearly 50 percent over the last few decades. That growth, largely fueled by climate change, means that such floods will likely strike more frequently in the future, the team concluded in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change. Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues did not set out to take a global census of glacial lakes. They had originally planned to focus on only a few dozen concentrated in the Himalayas and neighboring mountain ranges in East and South Asia. But when the team finished writing computer programs to automatically identify and outline water in satellite images, they realized they could easily expand their study to include most of the world’s glacial lakes. “It wasn’t that much of a bigger leap,” Dr. Shugar said. The researchers collected more than 250,000 Landsat images of the Earth’s surface and fed that satellite imagery into Google Earth Engine, a platform for analyzing large Earth science data sets, to assemble the most complete glacial lake inventory to date. “We mapped almost the whole world,” Dr. Shugar said. Image A controlled exit channel for adjusting water levels on Imja Lake, near Mount Everest in Nepal.Credit...Prakash Mathema/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images This study demonstrates cloud computing’s capabilities, said David Rounce, a glaciologist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the research. “Being able to churn through over 200,000 images is really remarkable.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/science/global-warming-glacial-lakes.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=false&req_id=284932658&algo=identity&imp_id=619070864&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/science/global-warming-glacial-lakes.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=false&req_id=284932658&algo=identity&imp_id=619070864&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage)