Purog Kangri () is an

ice field An ice field (also spelled icefield) is a mass of interconnected valley glaciers (also called mountain glaciers or alpine glaciers) on a mountain mass with protruding rock ridges or summits. They are often found in the colder climates and high ...

in the

Tibetan Plateau The Tibetan Plateau, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or Qingzang Plateau, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central Asia, Central, South Asia, South, and East Asia. Geographically, it is located to the north of H ...

, in

Nagqu Nagqu (also Naqu, Nakchu, or Nagchu; ; ) is a prefecture-level city in the north of the Chinese autonomous region of Tibet. On May 7, 2018, the former Nagqu Prefecture was officially declared the sixth prefecture-level city in Tibet after Lhas ...

, China. It is shrinking rapidly.

Location

Purog Kangri was discovered by Chinese and American scientists around 1999. The other two are in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Purog Kangri is in the Nagqu prefecture-level city of Tibet, China. It is in a harsh mountain environment that is not accessible to tourists. It is about from the double lake. The Purog Kangri ice field is at at an elevation of above sea level. The ice field is the largest in the North of the

. It is made up of several ice caps with a total area of as of 2002, and a volume of about . The glacier snow line is above sea level. The ice field is radial, with over 50 tongues of ice of different lengths that extend from the ice field through wide and shallow valleys. In the areas with lower tongues there are many ice pyramids.

Climate

Purog Kangri is near the boundary between the southern part of the Tibetan Plateau, where the weather is driven by the monsoon cycle, and the northern part where it is driven by continental westerly storms coming from the Arctic and the North Atlantic. The latter process has the greatest effect on the ice field. The Tibetan Plateau and Himalaya hold the largest amount of ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Meltwater from the glaciers feeds the

Yangtze The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ) is the longest river in Eurasia and the third-longest in the world. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flows including Dam Qu River the longest source of the Yangtze, i ...

Yellow Yellow is the color between green and orange on the spectrum of light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 575585 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In t ...

Indus The Indus ( ) is a transboundary river of Asia and a trans- Himalayan river of South and Central Asia. The river rises in mountain springs northeast of Mount Kailash in the Western Tibet region of China, flows northwest through the dis ...

Brahmaputra The Brahmaputra is a trans-boundary river which flows through Southwestern China, Northeastern India, and Bangladesh. It is known as Brahmaputra or Luit in Assamese, Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibetan, the Siang/Dihang River in Arunachali, and ...

and

Ganges The Ganges ( ; in India: Ganga, ; in Bangladesh: Padma, ). "The Ganges Basin, known in India as the Ganga and in Bangladesh as the Padma, is an international which goes through India, Bangladesh, Nepal and China." is a trans-boundary rive ...

rivers. The glaciers have been shrinking since the

Little Ice Age The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. It was not a true ice age of global extent. The term was introduced into scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939. Mat ...

Shrinkage

Ice cores were recovered from the Purog Kangri ice field in 2000, filling a gap in knowledge of climate change in the Central Tibetan Plateau. The longest core was . The upper covered the last 1,000 years, and was analyzed along its length for the δ¹⁸O oxygen isotope ratio. The results, correlated and checked against ice cores from other locations, showed a sharp increase in temperature starting in the late 19th century. Between 1960 and 2004 the glaciers in the region have shrunk in volume by , or 7%, and in area by , or 5.5%. The rate of shrinkage is expected to accelerate, with 2/3 of China's glaciers gone by 2060. Measurements using

interferometric synthetic-aperture radar Interferometric synthetic aperture radar, abbreviated InSAR (or deprecated IfSAR), is a radar technique used in geodesy and remote sensing. This geodetic method uses two or more synthetic aperture radar (SAR) radar imaging, images to generate maps ...

showed that the ice field became slightly thicker in 2011–2012, by about , then in 2012–2016 thinned each year by . This was mainly due to a steep drop in annual precipitation, from . Another study using TanDEM-X SAR data sets from 2012 and 2016 indicated annual surface thinning of with a margin of error.

Notes

Sources

* * * * * * * * {{Glaciers of China Glaciers of China Glaciers of Tibet Nagqu Ice fields