US EditionCentral Asia's Last Resilient Glaciers Hit Tipping Point
Researchers modeled glacier behavior from 1999 to 2023, identifying a significant tipping point in 2018 linked to decreased snowfall impacting glacier health and water resources.
- An international team modeled the Kyzylsu Glacier catchment's behavior in Tajikistan from 1999 to 2023 and established a monitoring network in 2021.
- The team acted because decades of scarce observational data followed the Soviet Union's collapse, limiting glacier monitoring until recent collaborative efforts started.
- Their models detected a tipping point by 2018 due to decreased snowfall altering glacier behavior and health in this semiarid, glacier-dependent region.
- Increased glacier melt now compensates for roughly one-third of lost water from reduced precipitation, while Jouberton cautions it is unclear if this marks a 'point of no return'.
- This study suggests that some of Central Asia's last resilient glaciers are losing stability, signaling potential future impacts on regional water resources and ecosystems.
18 Articles
18 Articles
Central Asia’s last stable glaciers just started to collapse
Snowfall shortages are now destabilizing some of the world’s last resilient glaciers, as shown by a new study in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains. Using a monitoring station on Kyzylsu Glacier, researchers discovered that stability ended around 2018, when snowfall declined sharply and melt accelerated. The work sheds light on the Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, where glaciers had resisted climate change longer than expected.
der Standard AT
der Standard DENew data suggest that seemingly stable glaciers in the Pamir mountains do not grow, but melt.
Snowfall decrease in recent years undermines glacier health and meltwater resources in the Northwestern Pamirs - Communications Earth & Environment
Central Asia hosts some of the world’s last relatively healthy mountain glaciers and is heavily dependent on snow and ice melt for downstream water supply, though the causes of this stable glacier state are not known. We combine recent in-situ observations, climate reanalysis and remote sensing data to force a land-surface model to reconstruct glacier changes over the last two decades (1999–2023) and disentangle their causes over a benchmark gla…
Eurek Alert
myscience.orgThe tipping of the last resilient glaciers
Too little snowfall is now also shaking the foundations of some of the world’s most resilient 'water towers', a new study led by the Pellicciotti group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows. After establishing a monitoring network on a new benchmark glacier in central Tajikistan, the international team of researchers was able to model the entire catchment’s behavior from 1999 to 2023. The results, sh…
The tipping of the last resilient glaciers: Filling in years of missing data from Tajikistan
Too little snowfall is now also shaking the foundations of some of the world's most resilient "water towers," a new study led by the Pellicciotti group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows. After establishing a monitoring network on a new benchmark glacier in central Tajikistan, the international team of researchers was able to model the entire catchment's behavior from 1999 to 2023.
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