This paper calculated and evaluated the area and ice volume changes of Kangwure Glacier in Mt.Xixiabangma,middle of Himalayas in the past 3 decades,based on the field survey of glacier boundary position by differential GPS and glacier depth by Ground Penetrating Radar(GPR),together with the topographic map and remote sense data.The studied data showed that the Kangwure Glacier has experienced significant mass deficit since the 1970s,with 34.2%of area loss,48.2%ofice volume loss and 7.5 m of average thickness decrease.This result revealed that the ice volume loss of Himalayan glaciers was more serious than expected.Analysis of meteorological data from two weather stations in the region of Mt.Xixiabangma,shows that the air temperature of this region has risen from the middle of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century.Significant retreat of Himalayas glacier driven by climatic warming will have a remarkable impact on hydrology and ecosystem.
A short lake sedimentary core and ice core were recovered from Lake Chen Co and Noijingangsang Glacier,respectively,in the Lake Yamdrok watershed of the southern Tibetan Plateau.Hydrogen isotope ratios of the ice core(δDice) and δD values of terrestrial n-alkanes(δDwax) in the sediments showed a linear correlation(R2 = 0.41,P = 0.047) over the past 80 years,indicating the effect of hydrogen isotope ratios of precipitation(δDp) on δDwax.However,apparent fractionation(εwax-p) values of δDwax relative to δDice increased with decreasing ice core accumulation(amount of precipitation;R2 = 0.65,P = 0.0051),revealing that dry or wet climate variation had a significant impact on δDwax.Thus,precipitation amount and δDp are both important in determining δDwax.
Mountain glaciers are sensitive to environment. It is important to acquire ice flow velocities over time for glacier research and hazard forecast. For this paper, cross-correlating of optical images is used to monitor ice flow velocities, and an improvement, which is called "moving grid," is made to this method. For this research, two remote-sensing images in a certain glacier area, dur-ing different times are selected. The first image is divided into grids, and we calculated the correlation coefficient of each window in the grid with the window on the second image. The window with the highest correlation coefficient is considered the counter-part one on the first image. The displacement of the two corresponding windows is the movement of the glacier, and it is used to calculate glacier surface velocity. Compared to the traditional way of dividing an image with ascertain grid, this method uses small steps to move the grid from one location to another adjacent location until the whole glacier area is covered in the image, thus in-creasing corresponding point density. We selected a glacier in the Tianshan Mountains for this experiment and used two re-mote-sensing images with a 10-year interval to determine this method.
