IIT Guwahati identifies high-risk 492 glacial lake sites in eastern Himalayas

Research from IIT Guwahati has developed a predictive framework to identify the locations where glacial lakes are likely to form in the eastern Himalayan mountain regions. The research provides crucial insights for hazard management and water-resource planning in high-mountain regions.

When glaciers melt, its water accumulates in the natural depressions. In the Himalayas, the glaciers are rapidly melting due to climate change, which is leading to the formation of new glacial lakes. The expansion of glacial lakes increases the chance of its outburst resulting in floods, which can destroy infrastructure, and disrupt natural habitats. Past disasters such as the Kedarnath floods in 2013 and the recent Uttarkashi floods in August 2025 show the high stakes involved.

The IIT Guwahati team created a probabilistic framework, a smarter way to forecast future glacial lakes formation location. The team achieved this by using high-resolution Google Earth images and digital elevation models that help capture complex landscape features and estimate uncertainty in the predictions. This makes the forecasts more realistic and reliable, reflecting the natural variability and unpredictability of mountain environments. The findings of this research have been published in the Nature’s Scientic Reports journal, in a paper co-authored by Prof Ajay Dashora, along with his research scholar Anushka Vashistha, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Guwahati, and Dr Afroz Ahmad Shah, Universiti of Brunei Darussalam (UBD), Brunei.

With the developed framework, the research team identified 492 locations in the Eastern Himalaya where new glacial lakes are likely to form, thereby indicating areas that require careful monitoring and preventive measures. The research is still at the laboratory stage. As the next step, the research team plans to integrate moraine development histories, automate data preparation, and add field-based validation to the developed framework.