[maurella]

OK, I'm stumped here The Associated Press released an article, "Study: 15 million people live under threat of glacial floods" https://apnews.com/article/floods-science-india-peru-pakistan-51368bb5eef49a240d3d466775e34ed6 The end of the article had this statement: Three lake basins in the United States and Canada rank high for threats, from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, but aren’t nearly as high as areas in Asia and the Andes with few people in the danger zone. They are in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula — distinct from the Mendenhall glacier near Juneau — northeast Washington and west central British Columbia. Anyone have an idea of what is meant by "northeast Washington"? Thanks in any case.

[Sore Feet]

Its gotta be a typo or error. The only glaciers with any recent history of outburst floods in Washington are those on Rainier and Baker. So maybe it's referring to the Baker Lake basin and it was supposed to say "northwest Washington"? Only way NE Washington could be construed as under threat is from the Columbia, but even if there were major outburst floods in the upper Columbia basin, they wouldn't at all threaten the NE part of the state just because of the distance involved and the comparatively small rise in water level they'd produce on such a large river.

[Malachai Constant]

To me it sounds kind of an alarmist clickbait article. To me Northeast WA is north of Spokane, no big glaciers or lakes there since the Pleistocene. The big glaciers west of the crest like the Inspiration and Eldorado do not have big lakes.

[SeanSullivan86]

Maybe the danger zone is the whole "Clark Fork-Pend Oreille Basin", which extends from Montana to NE Washington

[Sculpin]

I read the paper so you don't have to. The reference to northeast Washington is not a typo. The paper is garbage, at least the PNW part. This was published by a group of British geographers, with one from NZ. It is part of an ongoing climate scare initiative at Nature Communications (BTW papers like this don't make it into the flagship journal Nature), with the scare papers blending seamlessly into real climate science. Apparently someone thinks that is a good idea. The authors used an algorithm on digital map data to estimate various aspects of lakes that were originally formed by glaciers. Some of the lakes are currently held back by ice in places like the Himalayas, and in those cases, global warming exacerbates the sudden outflow danger downstream to folks living along the river below. It is this danger that the authors invite you to think they are estimating. But some of the glacial lakes the algorithm picked up are currently held back by a dam. And you know what, the dam operators might be eating donuts right now, but I bet they would notice if, say, Lake Pend Oreille started to rise and threaten to overtop the dam. And I bet they would release more water and the dam would not fail. So even if climate change doubles the flow - and all the scary "climate communication" has been about drought, I might add - it will not cause catastrophe in northeast Washington. I will admit to being confused as to why the algorithm did not pick up Lake Chelan. Heck they could have colored the entire lower Columbia and Willamette Valleys an angry red color. It looks like the scientists wanted big scary numbers and were willing to shrug off the stupid stuff by hiding behind their algorithm. I rate the paper

[SeanSullivan86]

Yeah I agree the methodology was pretty useless for evaluating any actual local situation. They talked a lot about identifying risk globally and applying averages. Like they only used the size of the lake and its presence in an existing "glacial lakes" dataset to predict the intensity of an event. And then just joined with human population datasets.

[thunderhead]

Journalists usually publish stories to sell advertisements, not convey accurate info. ESPECIALLY in the case of science. Which most journalists don't understand and would not be able to write about accurately even if they wanted.

[Sore Feet]

Here's the full study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36033-x Definitely looks like there's some severely flawed methodology here, because there are basins highlighted as the most dangerous in the PNW which simply don't have the glacial mass to produce outburst floods.

[maurella]

One thing I noticed in the paper the article was derived from included a study (Reference 44) which was about metrics relating to research papers done about GLOFs (Glacial Lake Outflow Floods). That study was about where and how many GLOF studies have been made and trends in that area, I think the point being that areas like the Andes and Himalayas were underrepresented. It was not about the contents of those studies and included GLOF studies of Pleistocene events including the Missoula floods, hence the tie to NE Washington. I get the impression they counted those studies as if they were all contemporary risks.