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| Mount Fitzroy - Image by David Mark from Pixabay |
1. Introduction: Glacial lakes, form as glaciers melt and retreat, are a source of drinking and irrigation water for many communities, as well as deadly due to GLOF (Glacial Lake Outburst Flood)
2. Technology:
·Cloud computing’s capabilities was involved to automatically identify and outline water in satellite images to easily study most of the world’s glacial lakes
·More than 250,000 satellite imagery were fed into Google Earth Engine to assemble the most complete glacial lake inventory to date
· Global coverage makes it possible to pick out large-scale patterns and regional differences
3. Findings:
· Number of lakes increased to over 14,300 from roughly 9,400, an uptick of more than 50 percent and volume of water in the lakes increased by about 50 percent.
Largely fueled by climate change over the last few decades, means floods will likely strike more frequently in the future
· Lakes at high latitudes exhibited the fastest growth as climate change is warming the Arctic faster
· Rapid growth of glacial lake is posing significant danger to downstream communities
· Glacial lakes sit in bowl-shaped depressions can cause outburst flood as moraine collapses
4. Global census can help identify other lakes in need of monitoring or remediation that allows governments to see where the hot spots might be for glacial lakes growing in the future
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