Threat of glacial lake outburst flood to Tehsil Gupis from Khukush Lake, District Ghizer, Gilgit Baltistan, Pakistan

Gohar Rehman (), Sajjad Ahmad (), Shuhab Khan (), Fayaz Ali (), Taqweemul Ali () and Sadaf Khan ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 70, issue 2, 1589-1602

Abstract: Glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) is a powerful natural phenomenon that is very active in the Karakoram and Himalayas. This paper presents a case study from Gupis Tehsil in northern areas of Pakistan that is exposed to GLOFs from nine different glacial lakes in its upper catchment areas. Khukush Lake being the largest of all the glacial lakes has been studied and a flood attenuation model has been created for the whole Gupis Tehsil. This lake covers almost 2.2 km 2 of surface area, and its calculated volume is 2.6 × 10 4 m 3 . In case of its outburst, the peak flow discharge is calculated to be 7,642 m 3 /s. The catchment area which contributes water and debris to the lake is 170 km 2 . This lake is dammed by a glacial moraine, which is not strong enough to sustain the pressure for a longer period of time. Other factors that are reducing the reliability of the dam are the secondary hazards which are in direct contact with the lake, and in case of their reactivation, they can put severe impacts on the dam. There are eight potential sites of the snow avalanche activity where debris along with snow may fall directly into the lake producing a strong wave. This strong wave of water will increase the pressure on the dam and ultimately will increase the probability for its outburst. The presense of water springs towards the downstream side of the natural dam also indicate the presence of hidden channels passing through the dam which may weaken the shear strength of the dam. Almost 24 villages settled along either sides of the Gupis River are critically studied for the expected flood from Khukush Lake. With few exceptions, almost 20–25 % area of all the villages will be affected from this flood. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Outburst flood; Glacial lake; Himalaya; Karakoram; Ghizer; GLOF (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-013-0893-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:70:y:2014:i:2:p:1589-1602

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0893-6

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().