Abstract
Natural glacier events such as ice avalanches, debris flows or glacier lake outburst floods (GLOF) may have hazardous impacts on the downstream area of the glacier and can cause severe destructions. The Inylchek Glaciers in Kyrgyzstan, are one of the largest non-polar glacier systems in the world. Each year, an ice-dammed lake is formed (Lake Merzbacher) by melt-water which drains predominantly every year suddenly within a few days causing a destructive flood. To understand the mechanism of the GLOF, a network of continuously operating GPS stations at the Inylchek Glaciers provide daily horizontal and vertical positions of the ice-dam in front of the Merzbacher Lake. Irrespective of the general motion during the year, the ice-dam is strongly influenced by the formation and outburst of the lake. Especially the vertical position and surface velocities increase shortly before the GLOF supporting the assumption that the ice-dam adjacent to the lake becomes afloat. After the GLOF, e.g. in 2014, the elevation decreases rapidly by 20 m within 8 days. In 2015, the GLOF changes in timing, magnitude and available lake water volume but the motion pattern of the ice-dam is similar compared to the year before. These comparable results have the potential to develop an early warning system for the glacier-dammed lake outburst flood.
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Acknowledgements
The installation and operation of the monitoring network at Lake Merzbacher is funded by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ, Potsdam) and supported by the Central Asian Institute for Applied Geosciences (CAIAG, Bishkek) as part of the Global Change Observatory Central Asia of GFZ. This work is also supported by the CAWa project (www.cawa-project.net) which is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the “German Water Initiative for Central Asia” (the so-called “Berlin Process”, grant AA7090002) and the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association in the frame of the Helmholtz Alliance “Remote Sensing and Earth System Dynamics”. The authors thank their colleagues at GFZ and CAIAG for preparing, installing and maintaining the monitoring stations. In particular the work of T. Queisser, N. Stolarczuk, M. Köppl, A. Shakirov, A. Sharshebaev, F. Yunusov, S. Barkalov, B. Aliev, A. Serenkov, and A. Dudashvili is gratefully acknowledged. Also the work of Christoph Mayer (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich) and Elisabeth Mayr (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich) is highly appreciated.
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Zech, C., Schöne, T., Neelmeijer, J., Zubovich, A. (2016). Continuous Kinematic GPS Monitoring of a Glacier Lake Outburst Flood. In: Freymueller, J.T., Sánchez, L. (eds) International Symposium on Earth and Environmental Sciences for Future Generations. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 147. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/1345_2016_246
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1345_2016_246
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