| 20 Oct 2025
Rapidly Changing Lake-Terminating Glaciers in High Mountain Asia: A Dataset from 1990 to 2022
Abstract. Lake-terminating glaciers (LTGs) typically exhibit higher rates of retreat and thinning compared to land-terminating glaciers. However, a comprehensive inventory for LTGs and their associate proglacial lakes across High Mountain Asia (HMA) is currently lacking, limiting further understanding of their spatial heterogeneity in glacier change. This study employs a semi-automated identification method, coupled with rigorous visual inspection, to construct a comprehensive inventory of LTGs and proglacial lakes in HMA for 1990 and 2022. Our data indicate that, by 2022, HMA hosted 1740 LTGs (5082.08 ± 13.15 km²), among which 667 glaciers (3454.59 ± 12.43 km²) remained in contact with proglacial lakes since 1990, 1073 (1627.49 ± 4.30 km²) are newly developed and 468 (960.13 ± 3.18 km²) had disconnected from proglacial lakes during the investigation period. Accordingly, 645 proglacial lakes (207.18 ± 0.82 km²) remained in contact with ice, 1123 new lakes (54.85 ± 0.35 km²) formed, and 485 lakes (45.31 ± 0.34 km²) detached from ice (including 25 disappeared). During the past 32 year, the total area of proglacial lakes increased by 138.19 ± 1.18 km² (81.7 %), alongside a glacier area loss of 324.43 ± 19.23 km² (5.1 %). The southern regions of HMA, particularly the Hindu Kush, Himalayas, Nyainqentanglha, and Gangdise Mountains, exhibiting the highest concentration and rapidest changes of the glacier-lake system. We hope that this dataset will improve our understanding of mountain glacier-lake interactions, water availability, as well as glacier-related hazards in HMA.
The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17369580 (Luo and Liu, 2025).
The title “Rapidly changing lake-terminating glaciers in high mountain Asia: a dataset from 1990 to 2022” by Luo et al. described an important, high-quality dataset, vs a new continental-scale inventory of lake-terminating glaciers(LTGs) and their proglacial lakes in High Mountain Asia (HMA) from 1990 to 2022, which fills a recognized gap in HMA cryospheric inventories. The LTG dataset is first region-wide, openly available proglacial lake data through time, which are already on Zenoda with a DOI and CC-0 License. This methodology of dataset is rigorous, semi-automated and reproducible GEE workflow with manual verification using higher-resolution data(Planet labs) and cross-validation with existing datasets. By using long-term Landsat imageries (TM/OLI, 30m resolution) (1990±2 years, 2022±1 year), the study captured 32 years of change of LTG and glacier-lake.
Once the above transparency and validation items are addressed (most require only supplementary material or minor text), the paper will fully meet ESSD’s standards and should be published with minor revision.
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