Abstract
This study aims to demonstrate the capability of a low-cost echosounder for measuring the depths of high-altitude glacial lakes. A pilot survey was conducted in a shallow glacial lake associated with the Drang Drung glacier located in the Zanskar region of Ladakh, India. A bathymetric survey was carried out using Airmar P66 echosounder mounted on the inflatable Sea Eagle 380x Explorer kayak. From over 5000 data points, the maximum depth of glacial lake comes out to be 3.85 m with a mean depth of around 1.91 m. Depth estimates from the low-cost echosounder were in close agreement with manual measurements carried out at selected locations. The individual data points recorded by the echosounder were used to create 2D and 3D maps resulting in an estimation of the volume of water present in the glacial lake. Based on the collected points, the total volume of water present in the glacial lake comes out to be 0.18×106 m3. To ensure the correctness and to check the consistency in the performance of low-cost echosounder in different environments, bathymetric surveys were conducted at three different water bodies. The depth estimates at all three different test sites obtained from the instrument showed accurate results. The obtained results signify that a low-cost and simple hydrographic surveying system such as the one adopted in this study provides reliable bathymetric measurements and is suitable for water volume estimation in logistically demanding highly altitude glacial lakes.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MOES) and Ministry of Education (erstwhile Ministry of Human Resource Development), Government of India, for the project titled ‘Risk Assessment of Moraine Dammed Glacier Lakes Due To Climate Change’ (Project Number: 4096) under the scheme called IMPacting Research INnovation and Technology (IMPRINT) scheme. The authors would like to thank Mr Nadeem Ahmad Najar, Mr Faisal Zahoor Jan, Mr Imtiyaz Ahmad Bhat, Mr Syed Danish Rafiq Kashani, Miss Heena Naz from the Department of Geoinformatics, University of Kashmir, for being part of the field investigations. The authors would like to thank Planet Labs for providing high-resolution Planet Scope images free of charge.
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RR: Conceptualization, methodology, field survey, writing – review and editing, supervision and funding; PV: Methodology, field survey, data curation, validation and writing – original draft preparation; UM and IR: Field survey, writing – review and editing.
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Communicated by Aparna Shukla
Supplementary material pertaining to this article is available on the Journal of Earth System Science website (http://www.ias.ac.in/Journals/Journal_of_Earth_System_Science).
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Ramsankaran, R., Verma, P., Majeed, U. et al. Kayak-based low-cost hydrographic surveying system: A demonstration in high altitude proglacial lake associated with Drang Drung Glacier, Zanskar Himalaya. J Earth Syst Sci 132, 9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-02021-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-022-02021-w