Tibet’s Lakes Are Surging – Scientists Are Racing to Understand Why

While many lakes worldwide are shrinking, the northern Tibetan Plateau is experiencing a dramatic expansion.

Satellite images spanning decades reveal that lakes are growing rapidly, fueled by climate-related shifts in precipitation and glacial melt. This surge in water levels is reshaping the landscape, with potential consequences for ecosystems, infrastructure, and human settlements.

Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau Are Rapidly Expanding

Scientists analyzing satellite data for lake trends have identified a region experiencing dramatic changes—the northern Tibetan Plateau. While many lakes worldwide have shrunk over the past three decades, this high-altitude area, often called the “roof of the world,” has seen a sharp increase in both the number and size of its lakes.

Satellite images illustrate this transformation in Nyima and Qiemo counties, a remote landscape of arid, high-altitude grasslands in southwestern China’s Changtang region. The Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 5 captured one image on August 1, 1994 (lower image above), while the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 recorded another on August 11, 2024 (upper image above), revealing significant lake expansion over time.

Decades of Satellite Observations

Since the 1970s, Landsat satellites have provided regular imagery of the Tibetan Plateau, offering scientists a long-term dataset for analysis. A global study based on Landsat data, published in Science, identified the northern Tibetan Plateau as home to some of the world’s fastest-growing lakes between 1992 and 2020.

In a study published in 2024 and focused specifically on the Tibetan Plateau, one group of researchers estimated that the plateau had a total of 4,385 lakes larger than 0.1 square kilometers in 1991, with 4.2 percent of them measuring between 10 and 50 square kilometers and 2.9 percent of them larger than 50 square kilometers. These lakes collectively covered 37,471 square kilometers, an area larger than Lake Erie. By 2023, the researchers counted more than 6,159 lakes covering 53,267 square kilometers of the plateau, an area nearly as large as Lake Michigan.

Why Are These Lakes Growing?

Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau are particularly prone to size variations because they mostly lie within endorheic basins, meaning water flows in but has no natural outlet. Factors such as precipitation levels, the rate of evaporation, and the intensity of seasonal thawing of frozen soils and melting of glacial ice thus play key roles in controlling the number and size of the plateau’s lakes.

Several regional analyses—including studies published in Scientific Reports, Journal of Hydrology, and Science of the Total Environment—focused on the lakes of the Tibetan Plateau. The decades of Landsat images analyzed in these studies showed major growth in lakes in the northern part of the plateau.

The Role of Climate Change in Expansion

Some research teams pointed to increased precipitation as the primary driver of lake expansion in the region, while others cited rising air temperatures and the subsequent melting of glaciers and permafrost as important contributing factors as well.

Other researchers have looked at the current and anticipated effects of these expanding lakes. One team reported in Nature Geoscience that projected lake expansion by 2100 could lead to “widespread societal and ecological impacts,” noting that hundreds of kilometers of roads, hundreds of settlements, and 10,000 square kilometers of grasslands, wetlands, and croplands could be submerged.

The Human Cost of Expanding Lakes

“The dramatic increases in lake area are flooding people’s homes, displacing livestock, and making some glacial lakes vulnerable to outburst flooding,” said Fangfang Yao, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the study in Science. “The Tibetan Plateau is a very remote, harsh environment. Satellites like Landsat are the only way to observe changes across numerous lakes and long time periods.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

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