The southeastern Tibetan Plateau, where monsoonal temperate glaciers are most developed, has a huge number of glacial lakes. Based on Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI) images, 192 glacial lakes with a total area of 45.73 ± 6.18 km² in 2016 were delineated in the Yi’ong Zangbo River Basin. Glacial lakes with areas of less than 0.1 km² accounted for 81.77% of the total number, and glacial lakes located above 4500 m elevation comprised 83.33%. Dramatic glacier melting caused by climate warming has occurred, resulting in the formation and expansion of glacial lakes and the increase of potential glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) risk. From 1970 to 2016, the total area of glaciers in the basin has decreased by 35.39%, whereas the number and total area of glacial lakes have, respectively, increased by 86 and 1.59 km². In that time, 110 new glacial lakes emerged, whereas 24 of the original lakes disappeared. The newly formed lakes have a smaller mean area but higher mean elevation than the lakes that disappeared. Based on five indicators, a first-order method was used to identify glacial lakes that pose potential threats. We identified 10 lakes with very high, 7 with high, 31 with medium, and 19 with low GLOF susceptibility, out of 67 moraine-dammed glacial lakes with areas larger than 0.02 km². Understanding the behavior of glaciers and glacial lakes is a vital aspect of GLOFs disaster management, and the monitoring of glacial lakes should be strengthened.

The advancing of glaciers is a manifestation of dynamic glacial instability. Glaciers in the Tien Shan region, especially in the Central Tien Shan, show instability, and advancing glaciers have been recently detected. In this study, we used Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI remote sensing images to identify glaciers in the Tien Shan region from 1990 to 2019 and found that 48 glaciers advanced. Among them, thirty-four glaciers exhibited terminal advances, and 14 glaciers experienced advances on the tributary or trunk. Ten of the glaciers experiencing terminal advances have been identified as surging glaciers. These 48 glaciers are distributed in the western part of the Halik and Kungey Mountain Ranges in the Central Tien Shan, and Fergana Mountains in the Western Tien Shan, indicating that the Tien Shan is also one of the regions where advancing and surging glaciers are active. From 1990 to 2019, a total of 169 times advances occurred on 34 terminal advancing glaciers in the Tien Shan region; the highest number of advancing and surging of glaciers occurred in July (26 and 14 times, respectively). With reference to the existing literature and the present study, the surge cycle in the Tien Shan is longer than that in other regions at high latitudes in Asia, lasting about 35–60 years. Surging glaciers in the Tien Shan region may be affected by a combination of thermal and hydrological control. An increase in temperature and precipitation drives surging glaciers, but the change mechanism is still difficult to explain based on changes in a single climate variable, such as temperature or precipitation.

Glacier centerlines are crucial input for many glaciological applications. From the morphological perspective, we proposed a new automatic method to derive glacier centerlines, which is based on the Euclidean allocation and the terrain characteristics of glacier surface. In the algorithm, all glaciers are logically classified as three types including simple glacier, simple compound glacier, and complex glacier, with corresponding process ranges from simple to complex. The process for extracting centerlines of glaciers introduces auxiliary reference lines and follows the setting of not passing through bare rock. The program of automatic extraction of glacier centerlines was implemented in Python and only required the glacier boundary and digital elevation model (DEM) as input. Application of this method to 48 571 glaciers in the second Chinese glacier inventory automatically yielded the corresponding glacier centerlines with an average computing time of 20.96 s, a success rate of 100 % and a comprehensive accuracy of 94.34 %. A comparison of the longest length of glaciers to the corresponding glaciers in the Randolph Glacier Inventory v6.0 revealed that our results were superior. Meanwhile, our final product provides more information about glacier length, such as the average length, and the longest length, the lengths in the accumulation and ablation regions of each glacier.

With climate warming and intensification of human activities, the eco-environmental problems of lakes in middle and high latitudes become increasingly prominent. Qinghai Lake, located in the northeastern of the Tibetan Plateau, is the largest inland saltwater lake in China. Recently, the problem of Cladophora blooms has been widely concerning. In this study, the area of floating Cladophora blooms (hereafter FCBs) in Qinghai Lake from 1986 to 2021 was extracted using Floating Algal Index (FAI) method based on Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI images, and then the intra- and inter-annual variation characteristics and spatial patterns of FCBs were analyzed. The results show that the general change trend of FCBs in Qinghai Lake featured starting in May, expanding rapidly from June to August, and increasing steadily from September to October. From 1986 to 2021, the area of FCBs in Qinghai Lake showed an overall increasing trend in all months, with the largest increase in July at 0.1 km²/a, followed by October at 0.096 km²/a. Spatially speaking, the FCBs area showed a significant increasing trend in the northern Buha River estuary (BRN) and southern Buha River estuary (BRS) regions, a slight increase in the Shaliu River estuary (SR) region, and a decreasing trend in the Quanji River estuary (QR) region and the Heima River estuary (HR) region. The correlation between the meteorological factors and the changes in FCBs was weak, but the increase in flooded pastures in the BRN region (Bird Island) due to rising water levels was definitely responsible for the large-scale increase in FCBs in this region. However, the QB, northeastern bay of Shaliu River estuary (SRB) and HR regions, which also have extensive inundated grassland, did not have the same increase in FCBs area, suggesting that the growth of Cladophora is caused by multiple factors. The complex relationships need to be verified by further research. The current control measures have a certain inhibitory effect on the Cladophora bloom in Qinghai Lake because the FCBs area was significantly smaller in 2017–2020 (5.22 km², 3.32 km², 4.55 km² and 2.49 km²), when salvage work was performed, than in 2016 and 2021 (8.67 km² and 9.14 km²), when no salvage work was performed.