Characterizing the behaviour of surge- and non-surge-type glaciers in the Kingata Mountains, eastern Pamir, from 1999 to 2016

Lv, Mingyang; Guo, Huadong; Lu, Xiancai; Liu, Guang; Yan, Shiyong; Ruan, Zhixing; Ding, Yixing; Quincey, Duncan J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-219-2019

Articles | Volume 13, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-219-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-219-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 1

Research article

|

24 Jan 2019

Research article |

| 24 Jan 2019

Characterizing the behaviour of surge- and non-surge-type glaciers in the Kingata Mountains, eastern Pamir, from 1999 to 2016

Mingyang Lv, Huadong Guo, Xiancai Lu, Guang Liu, Shiyong Yan, Zhixing Ruan, Yixing Ding, and Duncan J. Quincey

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Final revised paper (published on 24 Jan 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 27 Jul 2018)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Sep 2018
- AC1: 'Auther response to two reviewer comments', Guang Liu, 13 Oct 2018
RC2: 'Review of "Characterising the behaviour of surge and non-surge type glaciers in the Kingata Mountains, Eastern Pamir, from 1999 to 2016"', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 Sep 2018
- AC1: 'Auther response to two reviewer comments', Guang Liu, 13 Oct 2018
AC1: 'Auther response to two reviewer comments', Guang Liu, 13 Oct 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Guang Liu on behalf of the Authors (13 Oct 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (30 Oct 2018) by Arjen Stroeven

AR by Guang Liu on behalf of the Authors (01 Nov 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Nov 2018) by Arjen Stroeven

RR by Luke Copland (03 Dec 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I commend the authors for undertaking significant new work to improve the quality of this paper after my original comments, and I believe that the manuscript is much stronger now as a result. In particular, the inclusion of image analysis using Google Earth makes the identification of glacier surges more convincing. Overall, the paper provides a comprehensive description of the distribution and characteristics of surge-type glaciers in a region where they've never been properly described before. This provides a significant contribution to the subject of glaciology and to the understanding of glacier dynamics in High Mountain Asia.

My comments below are all minor and technical in nature:
P1, L15: you don’t just use these image sources any more, as you now use Google Earth as well (which provides images with a better resolution than Landsat or ASTER)
P6, L16: ‘sign’ here doesn’t seem to be the correct word to use. Something like ‘features’ or ‘characteristics’ would seem to be better
P7, L23: specify over which period the advances listed here refer to
P13, L2: wording at the start of this line is a bit awkward. Suggest changing it to something like: ‘hydrological station suggest that this type…’
P13, L14: change to ‘availability of high spatial resolution…’
P15, L15: change ‘acknowledged of stable state in mass balance’ to ‘acknowledged to have a stable mass balance’
Fig. 7: the red lines are pretty difficult to see in some parts of this image, such as glacier E7
Table 2: this new table is very useful! It would be even better if you could provide more information about the year(s) being referred to in the column ‘Evidences of surge events’ (which should be written ‘Evidence of surge events’). E.g., which year(s) does the statement ‘A clear surge front in velocity profiles’ for E1 refer to?
Table S1: the inclusion of the cloud cover rate for each image in this table seems to be unnecessary, particularly since this number is notoriously unreliable in glaciated terrain (where the cloud-detection algorithm can get confused with bright snow-covered areas).
Fig. S2: the word ‘rest’ doesn’t make sense as used in this figure caption. Delete or change to something like ‘remaining’. The use of the yellow and white glacier termini outlines should also be included for more glaciers: e.g., the termini for E9 are currently difficult to distinguish in the sat images due to lack of these lines
Fig. S3: I like these animated gifs!

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (10 Jan 2019) by Arjen Stroeven

AR by Guang Liu on behalf of the Authors (17 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

We highlight 28 glaciers in the Kingata Mountains, among which 17 have changed markedly over the last decade. We identify four advancing and 13 surge-type glaciers. The dynamic evolution of the surges is similar to that of Karakoram, suggesting that both hydrological and thermal controls are important for surge initiation and recession. Topography seems to be a dominant control on non-surge glacier behaviour. Most glaciers experienced a significant and diverse change in their motion patterns.