Slight change of glaciers in the Pamir over the period 2000–2017

ABSTRACT

Glaciers in the Pamir are the water tower of arid Central Asia, and more than 50 million people depend on meltwater from them. Many studies have reported glacier changes in the Pamir, but the glacier inventories employed in the previous investigations are both outdated and lack comparability. In this study, we present a new multitemporal glacier inventory for the Pamir based primarily on the Landsat ETM+/OLI scenes from the period around 2000 and 2017. Glacier outlines in 2000 and 2017 were delineated manually using Landsat images, SRTM digital elevation model (DEM), and high-resolution Google Earth images, using the same criteria and methods. We mapped 12,186 glaciers covering 10,396.20 ± 421.16 km² in 2017 for the Pamir and demonstrated that the Pamir lost 124.28 ± 81.33 km² of its glacier areas with a shrinkage rate of 1.17 ± 0.77 percent or 0.07 ± 0.05 percent·a⁻¹ from 2000 to 2017. Based on the new inventories and the existing elevation change data sets of High Mountain Asia (HMA) from 2000 to 2016, we calculated a weaker glacier mass loss of −0.05 ± 0.06 m w.e. a⁻¹. Spatial heterogeneity of glacier changes has been found in both the area and mass balance, but our results still suggest that the Pamir glaciers changed slightly since 2000.

KEYWORDS:

• Pamir
• glacier inventory
• manual delineation
• debris-covered glacier

Acknowledgments

We thank the USGS for providing access to the Landsat images and SRTM DEM. We gratefully acknowledge the contributors of the RGI 6.0, GGI 15, GGI 18, and NM 18. We also thank all contributors to the elevation change data sets of the HMA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant Nos. XDA19070302, XDA20060201), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42130516), and the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (Grant No. 2019QZKK020102).