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 (RGI 7.0), which so far identifies marine-terminating glaciers in most regions, but not lake-terminating glaciers, we present a global inventory of lake-terminating glaciers, differentiating between three categories based on the degree of contact between the glacier terminus and any proglacial lakes. Contributors manually assigned categories to glaciers using satellite imagery from as close to the target date of 2000 as possible, aided by regional lake inventories where available. The resulting dataset corresponds to the year 2000 (±1.5), matching to the timestamp of RGI 7.0 outlines (2001 ± 6.2). We find that of 274 531 glaciers worldwide, 1.4 % terminate in lakes, with regional percentages varying between 0.5 % and 6.7 % across the 19 RGI regions. These glaciers account for 11.4 % of global glacier area (0.2 % to 41.8 % across regions). With multiple submissions available for 1260 individual glaciers, we find mapping conflicts between contributors 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 (last access: 2 February 2026). This dataset is integrated into the forthcoming update to the RGI, v7.1.