The Sichuan-Tibet Railway, China's second inland railway to Tibet, is currently being constructed and will run between Chengdu and Lhasa. It will cross the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and be surrounded by glacial lakes, some of which may pose a threat of glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) events. Both the specific location and the outburst susceptibility of these glacial lakes are largely unknown. In this study, we mapped the glacial lakes using declassified Corona KH-4 and Hexagon KH-9 from the 1960s and Sentinel-2 imagery from 2020 and assessed their spatio-temporal changes. GLOF-susceptibility criteria were established based on historical GLOF events. The results show that the total area (number) of glacial lakes has increased by 22% (20%) from 126.1 ± 2.4 km2 (1662 lakes) in the 1960s to 153.6 ± 11.1 km2 (1994 lakes) in 2020. Of these lakes, this study identified 38 very high and 85 high GLOF-susceptibility lakes; mainly distributed along the Bomi-Nyingchi railway section in the Parlung Zangbo River basin. Four of the very high GLOF-susceptibility glacial lakes may pose a threat to the railway and will require monitoring. The insights from this study can be used to mitigate the risk of GLOFs during the construction and maintenance of the Sichuan-Tibet Railway.

Despite their extreme elevation, glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau are losing mass in response to atmospheric warming, the pattern of which purportedly reflects regional contrasts in climate. Here we examine the evolution of glaciers along ~500 km of the Tanggula Shan, Central-Eastern Tibetan Plateau. Using remotely sensed datasets, we quantified changes in glacier mass, area and surface velocity, and compared these results to time series of meteorological observations, in order to disentangle drivers of glacier mass loss since the 1960s. Glacier mass loss has increased (from −0.21 ± 0.12 m w.e. a−1 in 1960s–2000s, to −0.52 ± 0.18 m w.e. a−1 in 2000s–2015/18) in association with pervasive positive temperature anomalies (up to 1.85°C), which are pronounced at the end of the now lengthened ablation season. However, glacier mass budget perturbations do not mirror the magnitude of temperature anomalies in sub-regions, thus additional factors have heightened glacier recession. We show how proglacial lake expansion and glacier surging have compounded glacier recession over decadal/multi-decadal time periods, and exert similar influence on glacier mass budgets as temperature changes. Our results demonstrate the importance of ice loss mechanisms not often incorporated into broad-scale glacier projections, which need to be better considered to refine future glacier runoff estimates.

Multi-proxy analyses of a sequence spanning the Younger Dryas (YD) in the Glacial Lake Hind basin of Manitoba provides insight into regional paleohydrology and paleovegetation of meltwater rivers and lakes spanning >4000 yr; the sequence is controlled by 25 new accelerator mass spectrometry ages. This lake, dammed by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, overflowed into Lake Agassiz. The pre-YD interval records rapid sedimentation from meltwaters that headed in proglacial lakes in the Canadian Prairies that are known to have been catastrophically released when ice or sediment barriers were breached. Pollen in this phase is dominated by pre-Quaternary forms eroded from Paleocene bedrock. At the onset of the YD at ~12.8 cal ka, the sudden appearance of concentrations of nanodiamonds, high-temperature magnetic spherules, platinum, and iridium provide evidence of an extraterrestrial (ET) event that others have identified at more than 40 sites in North America. Major changes in oceans and climate, and the catastrophic outflow of nearby Lake Agassiz at the onset of the YD, may be related. Lower water levels and a reduction of Souris River inflow to Lake Hind followed, which are reflected by more clayey and organic-rich sediments and a decrease in pre-Quaternary palynomorphs. This may have resulted from the deepening of river valleys caused by the release of meltwater triggered by the ET event. Wetlands then began to develop, leading to peat deposition from 12.3 to 11 cal ka. This was followed by a fluvial episode depositing sand and then by increased Holocene aridity that resulted in accumulation of a thick sequence of dune sands. A dry woodland environment with a mix of conifers (especially Picea and Larix) and deciduous trees (especially Populus and Quercus) covered the uplands from ~13 to 10 cal ka.

Radiocarbon-dated sediment cores from the Champlain Valley (northeastern USA) contain stratigraphic and micropaleontologic evidence for multiple, high-magnitude, freshwater discharges from North American proglacial lakes to the North Atlantic. Of particular interest are two large, closely spaced outflows that entered the North Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence estuary about 13,200–12,900 cal yr BP, near the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold event. We estimate from varve chronology, sedimentation rates and proglacial lake volumes that the duration of the first outflow was less than 1 yr and its discharge was approximately 0.1 Sv (1 Sverdrup = 106 m3 s−1). The second outflow lasted about a century with a sustained discharge sufficient to keep the Champlain Sea relatively fresh for its duration. According to climate models, both outflows may have had sufficient discharge, duration and timing to affect meridional ocean circulation and climate. In this report we compare the proglacial lake discharge record in the Champlain and St. Lawrence valleys to paleoclimate records from Greenland Ice cores and Cariaco Basin and discuss the two-step nature of the inception of the Younger Dryas.

Four traditionally recognized strandline complexes in the southern basin of glacial Lake Agassiz are the Herman, Norcross, Tintah and Campbell, whose names correspond to towns in west-central Minnesota that lie on a linear transect defined by the Great Northern railroad grade; the active corridor for commerce at the time when Warren Upham was mapping and naming the shorelines of Lake Agassiz (ca.1880–1895). Because shorelines represent static water planes, their extension around the lake margin establishes time-synchronous lake levels. Transitions between shoreline positions represent significant water-level fluctuations. However, geologic ages have never been obtained from sites near the namesake towns in the vicinity of the southern outlet. Here we report the first geologic ages for Lake Agassiz shorelines obtained at field sites along the namesake transect, and evaluate the emerging chronology in light of other paleoclimate records. Our current work from 11 sampling sites has yielded 16 independent ages. These results combined with a growing OSL age data set for Lake Agassiz's southern basin provide robust age constraints for the Herman, Norcross and Campbell strandlines with averages and standard deviations of 14.1 ± 0.3 ka, 13.6 ± 0.2 ka, and 10.5 ± 0.3 ka, respectively.