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As Bolivia’s glaciers soften, new lakes threaten mountain communities

Source link : https://bq3anews.com/as-bolivias-glaciers-soften-new-lakes-threaten-mountain-communities/

An enormous wall of water and particles swept down the Teesta valley within the japanese Himalayas on October 3 2023, inflicting well-liked devastation and the tragic lack of over 50 folks. This robust flood in India was once the results of a landslide which led to a glacial lake upper up the valley to spill over. This phenomenon is referred to as a glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF.

In a 2025 find out about of glacial lakes around the Bolivian Andes, my colleagues and I discovered that 11 are extremely liable to generating doubtlessly hazardous GLOFs. Such lakes are expanding in measurement and quantity as glaciers retreat world wide. In Bolivia, we noticed 60 new lakes shape in simply six years.

Over the similar six-year duration, glaciers within the area shrank abruptly. In the event that they proceed to soften on the similar charge, Bolivia will likely be solely ice loose through the 2080s. Sadly, that is more likely to be a conservative estimate.

We modelled the form of the land floor beneath the present ice to expect the place lakes would possibly shape in long run. We discovered greater than 50 possible lake websites. Additional tracking will confirm which of those rising lakes would possibly pose a chance to downstream populations or infrastructure.

In our find out about, we used excessive solution satellite tv for pc imagery to watch glaciers and glacial lakes around the Bolivian Andes. We mapped glacier and lake barriers at annual durations between 2016 and…

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Author : bq3anews

Publish date : 2026-03-22 07:59:00

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