Glacier avalanches in the Sedongpu region, China

For several years now, scientists have known that a glacier can actually detach from the mountain rock 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 a team of 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. The image, based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, shows the traces of ice/rock avalanches that occurred in 2017 and 2018, resulting from vast flows of rock and ice that finally partly blocked a river in the valley below.

Read full story: Glacier avalanches more common than thought