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Every year, climbers travel to the Himalayan
mountains in hopes

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of celebrating at the top of the world.

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Sometimes referred to our planet's ‘third
pole’, this region

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holds some of the world’s most iconic and challenging terrain.

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However, this landscape is changing.

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Many of the glaciers on popular trekking routes have retreated

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and given rise to new and larger glacial lakes.

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Which typically form when glacial meltwater
is blocked by ice dams or glacial sediment.

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And worldwide, retreating glaciers have led to

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an increase in the number and size of these glacial lakes.

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Researchers, supported by NASA's High Mountain Asia Program, used new supercomputing abilities

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and hundreds of thousands of Landsat satellite images

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to catalogue and analyze three decades'

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worth of glacial lake boundaries in the first-ever global study of its kind.

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The study found that, during that period, global
glacial lake volume increased ~48%.

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The analysis concluded that, worldwide, 
smaller glacial lakes were growing at a more

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rapid pace, and that lakes were occurring at
higher elevations than previously documented.

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This new assessment is a critical component
to understanding how these growing lakes may

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impact tourism, elevate hazard risk, and affect
infrastructure for the communities living downstream.

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And bring us one step closer to understanding

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the global changes to our cryosphere.

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