Glacier avalanches in Tibet’s Aru mountain range

In 2016, a glacier in Tibet’s Aru mountain range suddenly collapsed, killing 10 people and hundreds of livestock. A few months later, a second glacier in the same mountain range also unexpectedly collapsed. The image, based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, shows the traces left after these two avalanches. For several years now, scientists have known that glaciers can detach from the mountain rock like this and gush down to the valley at speeds of up to 300 kilometres an hour as a fluid ice-rock avalanche. However, a paper published recently in The Cryosphere describes how scientists working in ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Glaciers team has discovered, together with several colleagues, that these glacier detachments have happened much more often than had been known.

Read full story: Glacier avalanches more common than thought