Abstract
Due to global climate change and ongoing deglaciation, research on Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) is of great importance. The idea of a glacial lake outburst floods database project arose from our effort to identify regional specifics of these events in our region of research interest—the highest Peruvian mountain range, Cordillera Blanca. The project is designed under the International Programme on Landslides (IPL) for 3 years (2013–2015) and then we suppose it will be continued. The main goal of this project is the creation of a widely available online database of GLOFs that have occurred worldwide since the end of the “Little Ice Age”. An important step will be the initiation of international cooperation between individual scientific departments. We would like to complete and share information about each event, such as probable cause, flood volume, and socioeconomic impacts downstream. Our preliminary results showed important regional differences in the representation and proportion of various causes in different high mountainous regions worldwide. The most frequent causes are various types of dynamic slope movements into lakes (icefalls, rockfalls or other landslides). This cause is dominant in all of the studied regions. On the other hand, some causes are regionally specific—e.g., dam failure following a large earthquake was recorded in only one region, the Cordillera Blanca. Taking these differences into account is a crucial step in creating an optimal regionally focused method of GLOF hazard assessment.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Grant Agency of Czech Republic (P 209/11/1000) and Grant Agency of Charles University (Project GAUK No. 70 413) for their financial support.
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Emmer, A., Vilímek, V., Klimeš, J. (2014).
Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) Database Project.
In: Sassa, K., Canuti, P., Yin, Y. (eds) Landslide Science for a Safer Geoenvironment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04999-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04999-1_10
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