During the last few decades, the lake-terminating glaciers in the Himalaya have receded faster than the land-terminating glaciers as proglacial lakes have exacerbated the mass loss of their host glaciers. Monitoring the impacts of glacier recession and dynamics on lake extent and water volume provides an approach to assess the mass interplay between glaciers and proglacial lakes. We describe the recession of Longbasaba Glacier and estimate the mass wastage and its contribution to the water volume of its proglacial lake. The results show that the glacier area has decreased by 3% during 1988–2018, with a more variable recession prior to 2008 than in the last decade. Longbasaba Lake has expanded by 164% in area and 237% in water volume, primarily as a result of meltwater inflow produced from surface lowering of the glacier. Over the periods 1988–2000 and 2000–18, the mass loss contributed by glacier thinning has decreased from 81 to 61% of the total mass loss, accompanied by a nearly doubled contribution from terminus retreat. With the current rate of retreat, Longbasaba glacier is expected to terminate in its proglacial lake for another four decades. The hazard risk of this lake is expected to continue to increase in the near future because of the projected continued glacier mass loss and related lake expansion.

Influenced by the Indian monsoon, the Kangri Karpo Mountains (KKM) of the southeastern Tibetan Plateau is the most humid part of the plateau, and one of the most important regions with numerous monsoon temperate glaciers. Glacier mass balance estimates have been strongly negative in the KKM over recent decades, but the spatiotemporal characteristics of surface velocity are poorly understood. Using phase-correlation feature tracking on Landsat images, this study estimates spatiotemporal variabilities of monsoon temperate glaciers for the period of 1988–2019. Results show that a significant slowdown was observed below an elevation of 4900 m, while an accelerated ice flow was found at an elevation of 4900–5800 m over the past 30 years. The trend of slowdown was −0.1 m a−1 dec−1 during 1988–2000, and then it increased to −0.5 m a−1 dec−1 during 2001–2019.

To obtain information on changes in glacier mass balance in the central Nyainqentanglha Range, a comprehensive study was carried out based on digital-elevation models derived from the 1968 topographic maps, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission DEM (2000) and TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X (2013). Glacier area changes between 1968 and 2016 were derived from topographic maps and Landsat OLI images. This showed the area contained 715 glaciers, with an area of 1713.42 ± 51.82 km2, in 2016. Ice cover has been shrinking by 0.68 ± 0.05% a−1 since 1968. The glacier area covered by debris accounted for 11.9% of the total and decreased in the SE–NW directions. Using digital elevation model differencing and differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry, a significant mass loss of 0.46 ± 0.10 m w.e. a−1 has been recorded since 1968; mass losses accelerated from 0.42 ± 0.20 m w.e. a−1 to 0.60 ± 0.20 m w.e. a−1 between 1968–2000 and 2000–2013, with thinning noticeably greater on the debris-covered ice than the clean ice. Surface-elevation changes can be influenced by ice cliffs, as well as debris cover and land- or lake-terminating glaciers. Changes showed spatial and temporal heterogeneity and a substantial correlation with climate warming and decreased precipitation.

Twin glaciers collapsed in 2016 near Aru Co, western Tibet and caused extreme loss to human beings. In this study, we attempted to track the dynamics of glaciers in the region, for example the glacier area and mass changes in Aru Co for the period 1971–2016, which were determined using topographic maps and Landsat images and ASTER-derived DEMs (2011–16), the Shuttle Radar Terrain Mission DEM (2000) and topographic maps (1971). Our results showed that the glacier area of Aru Co decreased by −0.4 ± 4.1% during 1971–2016. The geodetic mass-balance results showed that the glaciers in Aru Co lost mass at a rate of −0.15 ± 0.30 m w.e. a−1 during 1971–99, while they gained mass at a rate of 0.33 ± 0.61 m w.e. a−1 for the period 1999–2016. The twin glaciers experienced a larger negative mass budget than the others in the region before 1999. This process produced large amounts of meltwater, followed by a sustained increase in the meltwater on the pressure melting point, possibly in response to a period of positive mass balance (1999–2016) and then, transferred to the glacier bed until the glaciers collapsed.

Changes of glaciers and glacial lakes and their causes were examined in the Hengduan Shan from 1990 to 2014, based on Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI images. A total glacier area of 1298.8 ± 62.1 km2 and glacial lake area of 255.8 ± 31.6 km were inventoried in 2014. The area of glaciers declined at an average rate of −0.40 ± 0.26% a−1, while glacial lakes expanded at average rate of +0.12 ± 0.03% a−1 over the past 24 years. These changes probably resulted from an observable temperature increase and slight precipitation increase. A ‘corridor-barrier’ effect formed by the longitudinal range–gorge terrain may have had major impacts on the distributions and changes of glaciers and glacial lakes. The Ningjing-Yunling Shan, where glaciers and glacial lakes are sparsely distributed, are an important geographic transition line in the Hengduan Shan because of the barrier effect of the mountain ranges against moisture from the southwest. In contrast, between the south and north, there were small differences with respect to the distributions and changes of glaciers and glacial lakes, owing to a north–south corridor effect for water and heat transport and diffusion through the longitudinal gorges in the Hengduan Shan.

We investigate an internal surge of Karayaylak Glacier, which was reported by the media in May 2015. To differentiate the May 2015 glacier surge from other glacier advances, we surveyed changes in velocity, crevasses and glacier area using Landsat 8 OLI L1T, ZY-1-02C and Gaofen-1 images from October 2014 to July 2015. The velocity, measured by automatic feature extraction and tracking during the active phase, was 10–100 times the velocity during the quiescent phase, with a maximum of (20.2 ± 0.9) m d−1 (mean ± standard error) from 8 to 15 May 2015 in the west branch of the glacier. The surge initiation and termination took place from 13 April to 16 June 2015. Ice in the west branch (length, 7 km; area, 6.8 km2) of Karayaylak Glacier accelerated down to the east branch, leading to the development of crevasses and ice covering an additional 0.1 km2 of summer pasture on the northwestern side. However, we detected no advance of the glacier's terminus.

The second Chinese glacier inventory was compiled based on 218 Landsat TM/ETM+ scenes acquired mainly during 2006–10. The widely used band ratio segmentation method was applied as the first step in delineating glacier outlines, and then intensive manual improvements were performed. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model was used to derive altitudinal attributes of glaciers. The boundaries of some glaciers measured by real-time kinematic differential GPS or digitized from high-resolution images were used as references to validate the accuracy of the methods used to delineate glaciers, which resulted in positioning errors of ±10 m for manually improved clean-ice outlines and ±30 m for manually digitized outlines of debris-covered parts. The glacier area error of the compiled inventory, evaluated using these two positioning accuracies, was ±3.2%. The compiled parts of the new inventory have a total area of 43 087 km2, in which 1723 glaciers were covered by debris, with a total debris-covered area of 1494 km2. The area of uncompiled glaciers from the digitized first Chinese glacier inventory is ∼8753 km2, mainly distributed in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, where no images of acceptable quality for glacier outline delineation can be found during 2006–10.

The Tibetan Plateau interior area (TPIA), often termed the Qangtang Plateau, is distinguished by many dome-like mountains higher than 6000 ma.s.l. These mountains provide favourable conditions for the development of ice caps and glaciers of extreme continental/subpolar type. According to historical topographic maps (1959–80) and recent Landsat images (2004–11), continuous retreat was observed and the glacierized part of this area decreased by 9.5% (0.27% a–1) with respect to the total glacier area of 8036.4 km2 in the 1970s. Glaciers in the Zhari Namco basin have experienced the highest area shrinkage, with a reduction rate of 0.72% a–1, while the smallest reduction occurred in Bangong Co (0.12% a–1) and Dogai Coying basins (0.11% a–1). A regional gradient of area loss was found, with a larger decrease in the south and a smaller decrease in the north of the plateau. Comparisons indicate glaciers have experienced smaller shrinkage in the TPIA than in surrounding regions. Glacier shrinkage in the TPIA is mainly attributed to an increase in air temperature, while precipitation, glacier size and positive difference of glaciation also played an important role.

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2004 in Savannah, Georgia, USA, August 1–5, 2004.