A spatiotemporally constrained inventory of global glacial lakes

Climate change accelerates the extensive retreat and downwasting of glaciers, leading to the widespread formations and rapid growths of glacial lakes worldwide. Spatial distribution information on glacial lakes is crucial for evidencing the climate change impacts and warning about the hazards of glacial lake outbursts. The existing glacial lake inventories are mostly region or basin specific. Therefore, there is therefore a pressing need to obtain a spatially and temporally constrained dataset of global glacial lakes. Based on a semi-automated approach, this study inventories 117,352 glacial lakes (≥0.01 km2) worldwide, with a net area of 24,755.84 ± 2,971.33 km2. The evaluation result shows that the global glacial lake data have an average overall accuracy of 89.37% and 91.42% in number and area, respectively. The global glacial lakes are widely distributed in different altitudes, ranging from the Earth’s third pole to the coastal zones. Most glacial lakes are distributed in Greenland, High-Mountain Asia (HMA), Alaska, western and northern Canada, and the cordilleras. The number and total area of glacial lakes located at the altitude below 1000 m account for 59.35% and 82.84%, respectively, whereas the lakes spanning more than 3000 m are dominantly observed in HMA. The number of glacial lakes between 0.01–0.1 km2 accounts for 77.24% of the total count but only 11.82% of the total area. The classification of glacial lakes as four groups (non–glacier-fed, ice-uncontacted proglacial, ice-contacted proglacial, and supraglacial lakes) indicates that the ice-uncontacted proglacial lakes dominate the number (67.07%) and area (53.04%) worldwide. This dataset is expected to advance the monitoring of glacial lake expansions and the assessment of glacial hazard risk.