High frequency of moraine-dammed lake outburst floods driven by global warming

Abstract

Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) represent a major hazard in mountain regions, yet considerable uncertainty persists regarding whether their frequency has increased in recent decades and to what extent this trend is linked to climate change. Here, we developed a new inventory of GLOFs from moraine-dammed lakes, analyzing 609 events worldwide between 1900 and 2020. Insights from historical reports and geomorphological evidence presented a low but fluctuating increase in the global frequency of reported GLOFs prior to the 1970s. However, a marked acceleration occurred after the 1980s, with the annual frequency increasing from 5.2 GLOFs during 1981–1990 to 15.2 GLOFs during 2011–2020. Overall, the long-term trajectory of reported GLOF frequency closely parallels variations in global air temperature, exhibiting a lag-correlated pattern on timescales of approximately 20 years. The concept of GLOF response time was employed to explain this delayed reaction, which is attributed to warming-induced glacier recession, glacial lake expansion, and slope destabilization surrounding such lakes, ultimately triggering GLOFs.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Zhang, T. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8919-2023 Wang, W. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1352-6303 Kougkoulos, I. Cook, S.J. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1532-6532 Li, S. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2479-8665 Iribarren-Anacona, P. Watson, C.S. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2656-961X An, B. Yao, T.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Keywords:	Cryospheric science; Natural hazards
Dates:	Accepted: 4 December 2025 Published (online): 17 December 2025 Published: 17 December 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Geography and Planning
Date Deposited:	28 Jan 2026 16:26
Last Modified:	28 Jan 2026 16:26
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-025-67650-3
Related URLs:	PubMed URL Dataset Dataset Dataset Dataset Dataset Dataset Software or Code
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:236951

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High frequency of moraine-dammed lake outburst floods driven by global warming

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High frequency of moraine-dammed lake outburst floods driven by global warming

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