Rapidly changing lake-terminating glaciers in High Mountain Asia: a dataset from 1990 to 2022

Abstract

Lake-terminating glaciers (LTGs) typically exhibit higher rates of retreat and thinning compared to land-terminating glaciers. However, a comprehensive inventory for LTGs and their associated proglacial lakes across High Mountain Asia (HMA) is currently lacking, limiting further understanding of their spatial heterogeneity in glacier change. This study employs a semi-automated identification method, coupled with rigorous visual inspection, to construct a comprehensive inventory of LTGs and proglacial lakes in HMA for 1990 and 2022. Our data indicate that, by 2022, HMA hosted 1740 LTGs (5082.08 ± 13.15 km2), among which 667 glaciers (3454.59 ± 12.43 km2) remained in contact with proglacial lakes since 1990, 1073 (1627.49 ± 4.30 km2) are newly developed and 468 (960.13 ± 3.18 km2) had disconnected from proglacial lakes during the investigation period. Accordingly, 645 proglacial lakes (207.18 ± 0.82 km2) remained in contact with ice, 1123 new lakes (54.85 ± 0.35 km2) formed, and 485 lakes (45.31 ± 0.34 km2) detached from ice (including 25 disappeared). During the past 32 years, the total area of proglacial lakes increased by 138.19 ± 1.18 km2 (81.7 %), alongside a glacier area loss of 324.43 ± 19.23 km2 (5.1 %). The southern regions of HMA, particularly the Hindu Kush, Himalayas, Nyainqentanglha, and Gangdise Mountains, exhibited the highest concentration and most rapid changes of the glacier-lake system. We hope that this dataset will improve our understanding of mountain glacier-lake interactions, water availability, as well as glacier-related hazards in HMA. The dataset is openly available in GeoPackage format, with full attribute tables compliant with the RGI 7.0 vocabulary, and is hosted on Zenodo at 10.5281/zenodo.17369580 (Luo and Liu, 2025).