Frontiers in GLOF research and risk management

The last ca. 10 years have seen a particularly strong proliferation of research around glacier lake outburst floods (GLOF), with the number of corresponding peer-reviewed publications hitting 100 per year most recently.

Major progress has been made, and debates have developed, around the number, volume and change of glacial lakes, and the frequency of GLOF’s over time and the relation to glacier shrinkage and climate change, globally and in particular regions such as High Mountain Asia. Hazard and risk assessments have been performed widely, ranging from local to global scale, and against a range of climatic and socio-economic future scenarios. Major GLOF events and disasters such as the 2023 South Lhonak GLOF, have been carefully analyzed with an objective to better understand physical processes and impacts. GLOF’s are increasingly sketched as cascading processes, and thus posing important challenges to process understanding, modeling and forecast. A range of models have been applied to GLOF processes, from physically based models for local scale to simpler models at regional scale but important challenges remain.

Against this impressive progress in GLOF research, we identify and discuss here critical fields that have not yet received sufficient attention but have important scientific or societal relevance, or represent research areas where progress is facing important challenges and barriers. Specifically, we identify four core frontiers in GLOF research and risk management:

(1) Location and dynamics of hazard sources: recent cases have shown that GLOF’s often originate from poorly or unknown, or rapidly changing sources, thus posing a major issue for comprehensive hazard and risk analysis.

(2) Probability of occurrence of GLOF’s and GLOF-triggering mass movements such as rock / ice avalanches. Limited research has addressed this issue, and if, typically remained at a qualitative level. Quantification, however, will prove to be essential for areas such as climate litigation cases, for advancing probabilistic hazard and risk assessments, and as a basis for establishing risk transfer mechanisms like insurances.

(3) Several events have shown the eminent importance of sediment entrainment and flow dynamics for the impact of GLOF’s on population and infrastructure, but many challenges remain in terms of process understanding, modelling and assessment methods.

(4) Effectiveness of risk management and climate change adaptation for GLOFs: quite a range of disaster risk reduction measures for GLOF’s are recognized and global experiences have been recently comprehensively analyzed. However, as we further move into a rapidly changing high-mountain landscape, and public finance is increasingly stressed, the assessment of effectiveness and limits of risk management option against different levels of warming and related GLOF scenarios becomes more and more urgent.

We will elaborate how GLOF research can address these frontiers and what it may entail in terms of international cooperation.