The mountains are falling and I must go: paraglacial landslide response to glacier debuttressing in southern Alaska

Glacier mass loss due to anthropogenic climate change has far-reaching implications, one of which is the destabilization of paraglacial slopes. The buttressing force, or the support provided by the glacier to adjacent valley walls, changes and eventually decreases to zero as glaciers dwindle. However, the processes governing this (de-)buttressing, the amount of support glaciers can provide, and to what extent glacier retreat is responsible for landslide (re-)mobilization are still poorly understood. Paraglacial landslides can be hazardous, especially in the proximity of deep water, where a catastrophic failure has the potential to produce a tsunami.

We investigated eight large (roughly 20 to 500 million m³) paraglacial landslides in southern Alaska, a region which is experiencing some of the fastest glacier retreat worldwide. The selected landslides have varying degrees of ice contact: some are still experiencing active glacier retreat and thinning, others have already lost contact with the glacier. One of the selected landslides has undergone catastrophic failure, the others have not. We reconstructed the deformation history of the eight sites using Landsat images from the 1980s to present and automated and manual feature tracking. The slope evolution was then compared to ice thinning rates, ice velocity changes, the proximity of the landslide to the glacier terminus, environmental conditions, and seismic energy. 

We found that both thinning and retreat are sufficient conditions for landslide (re-)activation. In two cases we documented periods of acceleration for slopes where ice is still present at the landslide toe but thinning rapidly. In two further cases, substantial thinning did not correspond to any detectable motion. In four cases we observed a rapid retreat of the glacier terminus as the glacier retreated progressively up-fjord which led to the sudden onset of slope motion. This acceleration suggests decreased stability, which may be important in close proximity to water-filled basins, where rapid retreat due to calving is common and catastrophic landslides can cause tsunamis if they impact the water. The association of reduced glacier-slope contact, especially at rapidly retreating termini, with accelerated slope deformation suggests that buttressing is indeed an important stabilizer for paraglacial slopes. Furthermore, the off-and-on nature of deformation suggests there are critical thresholds for buttressing that, when crossed, leave slopes prone to rapid change.