A glacier near Lake Aru in western Tibet collapsed on 17 July 2016. Now the Journal of Glaciology publishes the first scientific account of this cryospheric disaster in which nine local yak herders were killed. Eyewitnesses
A glacier near Lake Aru in western Tibet collapsed on 17 July 2016. Now the Journal of Glaciology publishes the first scientific account of this cryospheric disaster in which nine local yak herders were killed. Eyewitnesses reported that the episode lasted only four to five minutes. More than 70 million cubic metres of ice tumbled down a mountain valley, spreading over a distance of 6 kilometres onto the lowland below.
Scientists from ITPCAS, the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, rushed to the site of the collapse to begin the task of trying to understand it. After the first question, “How did it happen?” the question uppermost in their minds was “Could other glaciers suffer the same fate?” They did not have to wait long for their answer.
On 21 September 2016 the neighbouring glacier to the southeast collapsed. Information about this second event remains sketchy, but although there were no deaths the volume of ice released was even larger than in the first collapse.
The two collapses are virtually unprecedented. Much smaller icefalls have been studied in the European Alps, but they were from glaciers much steeper than the Aru glaciers. These Aru collapses resemble that of the Kolka Glacier in the Russian Caucasus in September 2002, but that was a slide of mixed ice and rock which evolved into a mudflow. Moreover, Kolka is a rare example of a surging glacier, while the Aru glaciers have no known history of surging. In any case, surging is a stately phenomenon. A surge is an accelerated flow of ice from the upper to the lower part of a glacier, usually lasting months to years and usually resulting 