Daniel H. Shugar, John J. Clague, James L. Best, Christian Schoof, Michael J. Willis, Luke Copland and Gerard H. Roe

Nature Geoscience

Published date April 17, 2017

River piracy and drainage basin reorganization led by climate-driven glacier retreat

  • States that stream piracy has been investigated in glacial environments, but so far it has mainly been studied over Quaternary or longer timescales
  • Documents how retreat of Kaskawulsh Glacier—one of Canada’s largest glaciers—abruptly and radically altered the regional drainage pattern in spring 2016
  • Uses hydrological measurements and drone-generated digital elevation models to show that in late May 2016, meltwater from the glacier was re-routed from discharge in a northward direction into the Bering Sea, to southward into the Pacific Ocean
  • Concludes that this instance of river piracy was due to post-industrial climate change, based on satellite image analysis and a signal-to-noise ratio as a metric of glacier retreat
  • Emphasizes potential downstream impacts on ecosystems, sediment and carbon budgets, and communities that rely on a stable and sustained discharge