Accelerated loss of alpine glaciers in the Kodar Mountains, south-eastern Siberia
Highlights
► First ever multi-year study of glacier change from the Kodar Mountains, SE Siberia. ► Small decline in glacier area from the 1960s to 1995 followed by dramatic reduction. ► Reduction coincides with a marked summer warming trend that began in the 1980s. ► Topography and supra-glacial debris cover modulate glacier response. ► These glaciers may transition into a type of rock glacier within a few decades.
Introduction
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that the world's glaciers are losing mass in response to both atmospheric and oceanic warming (IPCC, 2007). This loss has resulted in sea level rise and the majority of the recent contribution from the cryosphere is derived from mountain glaciers and ice caps (~ 60% between 1996 and 2006), rather than the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica (Meier et al., 2007; although see Rignot et al., 2011). Indeed, estimates of glacier mass balance from outside Greenland and Antarctica have become progressively more negative since the 1970s (Dyurgerov and Meier, 2000, Kaser et al., 2006, Zemp et al., 2009) and their contribution to sea level rise is likely to continue to increase in the 21st century, despite uncertainties (Meier et al., 2007, Pfeffer et al., 2008, Bahr et al., 2009, Radić and Hock, 2011).
The response of a glacier to a change in climate is complex but small glaciers (e.g. < 2 km2) will tend to respond more rapidly to a given change in temperature and/or precipitation compared to larger glaciers (Meier, 1984, Oerlemans et al., 1998, Granshaw and Fountain, 2006). As such, they are important indicators of climate change and their existence is threatened in some regions (e.g. Ramírez et al., 2001, Zemp et al., 2006, Thompson et al., 2011). Indeed, glacier disappearance has been reported in several areas, e.g. Canadian Rocky Mountains (Tennant et al., 2012), North Cascade Range, USA (Granshaw and Fountain, 2006), Ak-Shiryak Range, Central Asia (Khromova et al., 2003), Terskey-Alatoo, Tien Shan (Kutuzov and Shahgedanova, 2009) and Italian-French Alps (Federici and Pappalardo, 2010). Whilst these observations and theoretical considerations (Oerlemans et al., 1998) suggest that small glaciers are most vulnerable, other work has reported only minimal changes in their extent in recent years (e.g. DeBeer and Sharp, 2007, DeBeer and Sharp, 2009, Hoffman et al., 2007) and this has been attributed to favourable topographic settings and/or locations at relatively high elevations (Kuhn, 1993, DeBeer and Sharp, 2009, Kutuzov and Shahgedanova, 2009). It is important, therefore, to investigate the recent response of small glaciers from a range of climatic regimes and topographic settings, and to extend observations to areas where change has not been investigated (cf. Dyurgerov and Meier, 2000, Ohmura, 2009). One such area is the Kodar Mountains in south-eastern Siberia.
The first study on glaciers in the Kodar Mountains was by Preobrazhenskiy (1960) and his observations were updated for the Russian Catalogue of Glaciers (Katalog Lednikov, Novikova and Grinberg, 1972; here on referred to as ‘KL’), which was subsequently transferred into the World Glacier Inventory (WGI) without being updated (National Snow and Ice Data Center, 1999: http://nsidc.org/data/glacier_inventory/). Since then, the region has attracted very little attention. This may reflect the remoteness of the Kodar Mountains and the relatively small number of glaciers (30 according to the KL/WGI), but the region is potentially important for a number of reasons. First, there has been no analysis of multi-year changes in glacier extent and it is unknown whether glaciers in this region mirror the recent glacier recession seen in other parts of Siberia (e.g. Ananicheva et al., 2005, Ananicheva et al., 2006, Surazakov et al., 2007, Gurney et al., 2008). Second, Kodar glaciers are located in an extreme continental climate. Oerlemans and Fortuin (1992) suggested that the climatic sensitivity of glaciers can vary over at least one order of magnitude, depending on precipitation, with continental glaciers less sensitive than those in more maritime regions (cf. Meier, 1984, Braithwaite et al., 2003, Anderson and Mackintosh, 2012). However, continental glaciers are generally under-reported in the literature and Kodar glaciers fill an important gap in this regard. Third, supporting the previous point, Solomina (2000) suggested that glaciers in the Kodar Mountains had shown the least recession from their ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA) moraines to the 1980s, compared to glaciers in other regions in northern Eurasia. Thus, there is a clear requirement for an up-to-date analysis of recent change and the objectives of this paper are to: (i) construct an updated glacier inventory for the region, (ii) provide the first multi-year remote sensing survey of recent changes, and (iii) compare recent changes to earlier glacier inventories and explore possible controls on glacier change (both climatic and topographic).
Section snippets
Topography and climate
The Kodar Mountains are located in south-eastern Siberia between 56°45′ and 57°15′ N, and 117° and 118° E, bordered by the Vitim and Olyokma tributaries of the Lena River (Fig. 1). Glaciers are located around the upper reaches of the Sygykta River (a tributary of the Vitim), approximately 500 km northeast of Lake Baikal and 1100 km west of the Sea of Okhotsk. With the exception of some tropical glaciers, they are the most isolated small group of glaciers on Earth: over 1200 km from any other known
Data sources
Glaciers were mapped mainly from three Landsat satellite images acquired on 17 July 1995 (Thematic Mapper (TM) path 126, row 020), 11 July 2001 (Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM +) path 126, row 020) and 27 July 2010 (ETM + path 127, 020). The two westernmost glaciers (numbers 29 and 30) were not covered by the 2001 scene and their outlines were taken from an adjacent image from path 128, row 020 on 13th August 2002.
Images were obtained from the United States Geological Survey GLOVIS website (//glovis.usgs.gov/
A new glacier inventory for the Kodar Mountains
An important outcome of this study is an up-to-date glacier inventory that can be compared to previous ones. We identified all of the glaciers on Preobrazhenskiy's (1960) map, apart from glacier number 7 (below centre on Fig. 2), which was also excluded from the KL inventory (Novikova and Grinberg, 1972) and the WGI. Either this glacier disappeared soon after Preobrazhenskiy's (1960) observations or it was misidentified. We also note that the glacier labelled ‘?’ on his original map (far left
Recent changes in exposed glacier extent and comparison to previous inventories
Our survey spanning 15 years reveals a ~ 40% reduction in the total area of exposed glacier ice from 1995 to 2010 (Table 1). The rate of shrinkage remained relatively steady at 3.11% a− 1 between 1995 and 2001, and 2.94% a− 1 between 2001 and 2010 (Table 2). In contrast, a comparison between our data and those reported from previous Russian inventories reveals only minimal recession between 1963 and 1974 (0.43% a− 1) and between 1974 and 1995 (0.11% a− 1). Thus, shrinkage rates in the Kodar Mountains
Conclusions
Mountain glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change, and numerous studies report their decline from around the world as a result of recent climatic warming (Dyurgerov and Meier, 2000, Kaser et al., 2006). Generally, smaller glaciers (e.g. < 2 km2) are thought to respond most rapidly to a given change in climate (Oerlemans et al., 1998) and there are reports of disappearances in a number of regions (e.g. Granshaw and Fountain, 2006, DeBeer and Sharp, 2009, Federici and Pappalardo, 2010,
Acknowledgements
This research was funded largely by the European Union INTAS project ‘Evaluating the recent and future climate change in the Mountains of southern Siberia’ (Grant number: 1000013-8593). Fieldwork was supported by project 3271.2010.5 of Federal Programme ‘Leading Scientific Schools of Russia’. CRS would like to thank Tim Farndale and acknowledge financial support provided by a Philip Leverhulme Prize and an anonymous alumni donation. We wish to thank the Editor (Hedi Oberhänsli) and diligent
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