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The joint driving effects of climate and weather changes caused the Chamoli glacier-rock avalanche in the high altitudes of the India Himalaya

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Abstract

Ice avalanches are one of the most devastating mountain hazards, and can pose a great risk to the security of the surrounding area. Although ice avalanches have been widely observed in mountainous regions around the world, only a few ice avalanche events have been studied comprehensively, due to the lack of available data. In this study, in response to the recent catastrophic rock-ice avalanche (7 February 2021) at Chamoli in the India Himalaya, we used high-resolution satellite images and found that this event was actually a glacier-rock landslide, where the collapse of the rock-ice body was caused by the sliding of the bedrock beneath the glacier, for which the source area and volume loss were about 2.89×105 m2 and 2.46×107 m3, respectively, corresponding to an average elevation change of about -85 m. Furthermore, visual analysis of the dense time-series satellite images shows that the overall downward sliding of the collapsed rock-ice body initiated around the summer of 2017, and thereafter exhibited clear seasonality (mainly in summer). Meteorological analysis reveals a strong rainfall anomaly in the initiation period of the sliding and a remarkable winter warming anomaly in the 40 days before the collapse. Comparisons of multi-temporal digital elevation models (DEMs) further suggest that the glacier geometry in the collapsed areas was likely changing (i.e., accelerated surface thinning in the lower part of the glaciers and insignificant change in the upper part), which is consistent with the region-wide climate warming. Finally, by combining the above findings and a geomorphic analysis, we conclude that the rock-ice avalanche event was mainly caused by the joint effects of climate and weather changes acting on a steeply sloping and fracture-prone geological condition. The findings of this study provide new and valuable evidence for the study of slope/glacier instability at high altitudes. This study also highlights that, for the Himalaya and other high mountain ranges, there is an urgent need to identify the glaciers that have a high risk of ice avalanches.

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Acknowledgements

The Pléiades satellite data were commercially purchased from Airbus Intelligence. The Sentinel-2 data can be freely downloaded at the Copernicus Open Access Hub (https://scihub.copernicus.eu/). The ERA5-Land datasets are archived at the Climate Data Store (https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-data-store). The NASA DEM data were obtained from the EarthData Search website (https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search). The HMA DEM data were downloaded from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) (https://nsidc.org/). The Gaofen-1 data were supplied by the Land Satellite Remote Sensing Application Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources of China. The Planet data were provided as part of a science data project by Planet. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41988101 & 42001381), the China Post-Doctoral Program for Innovative Talents (Grant No. BX20200343), and the China Post-Doctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2020M670480). The TanDEM-X data were provided as part of a science data project conducted by the German Aerospace Center (Grant No. NTI_BIST7136).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Tibetan Plateau Data Center, State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System and Resource Environment, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Yushan Zhou, Xin Li, Donghai Zheng, Baosheng An, Jianbin Su & Bin Cao

  2. School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Zhiwei Li

  3. College of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Yingzheng Wang

  4. Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Decai Jiang

  5. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Decai Jiang

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  1. Yushan Zhou
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  2. Xin Li
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Zhou, Y., Li, X., Zheng, D. et al. The joint driving effects of climate and weather changes caused the Chamoli glacier-rock avalanche in the high altitudes of the India Himalaya. Sci. China Earth Sci. 64, 1909–1921 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-021-9844-0

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