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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Owen KingORCiD, Professor Bethan DaviesORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Tropical Andean glaciers provide an important flux of freshwater to communities living both in high-altitude Cordillera and population centres downstream in countries such as Peru and Bolivia. Glacier recession threatens the sustainability of these water resources, and accurate modelling of future glacier behaviour is required to manage water stress in the region. These models must capture all processes contributing significantly to overall glacier mass budgets. Here we examine supraglacial pond and ice cliff development on three clean-ice glaciers in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Peru and their overall contribution to glacier mass balance. Whilst such features are common and well-studied on debris-covered glaciers, their development on debris-free glaciers has not been examined in detail. We use high-resolution contemporary and historical satellite imagery and repeat drone surveys to examine surface structure and geometry change over three glaciers during 1977–2024. We show how cliff and pond formation is driven by aspect-dependent surface melt of crevasse walls. These features act as ice loss hotspots, which enhance glacier net mass loss by ∼10% despite accounting for <5% glacier surface area. Incorporation of such amplified ice loss processes should be a priority for glacier model advances to achieve more accurate projections of future tropical glacier recession.
Author(s): King O, Montoya N, Davies BJ, Matthews T, Vargas M, Ghuffar S, Gribbin T, Perry B, Rado M, McNabb B, Nicholson L, Ely JC
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Glaciology
Year: 2025
Volume: 71
Online publication date: 27/11/2025
Acceptance date: 20/11/2025
Date deposited: 18/12/2025
ISSN (print): 0022-1430
ISSN (electronic): 1727-5652
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2025.10109
DOI: 10.1017/jog.2025.10109
Data Access Statement: Datasets documenting changes in glacier extent and surface elevation associated with this study are available on a public repository (10.5281/zenodo.17699108). xDEM is available at https://github. com/GlacioHack/xdem (last accessed: 31 January 2025; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo. 8220229).
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