Global mapping of lake-terminating glaciers

Abstract. Proglacial lakes at glacier termini have received widespread attention in the literature for their role in accelerating melt, velocity and contributing to cryospheric hazards. Although global and regional inventories for both glaciers and lakes exist, lake-terminating glaciers have not been consistently identified at the global scale. Based on the most recent global glacier inventory (RGI7), which so far only identifies some marine termini but none for lakes, we present a global inventory of lake-terminating glaciers, differentiating between three classes. The dataset corresponds to the year 2000 (± 1.5), matching to the timestamp of RGI7 outlines (2001, ± 6.2). We find that of 274,531 glaciers worldwide, 1.4 % terminate in lakes, varying between 0.5 and 6.7 % across 19 RGI regions. These glaciers account for 11.4 % of the total glacier area (0.2 to 41.8 % across regions). With multiple submitted flags available for 1260 individual glaciers, we find mapping conflicts to be low (6.7 %). The lake termini data set is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15524733 (Steiner et al., 2025) as well as at https://github.com/GLIMS-RGI/lake_terminating. This dataset is integrated into the forthcoming update to the RGI, v7.1.