International Journal of Environmental Science and Development
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Abstract—Glacial avalanche hazard poses threat to human
lives and damage settlements / infrastructures in alpine glaciers
mountainous regions. A gigantic ice plus rock avalanche
destroyed Gyari military camp in Siachen sector on April 2012
and buried 139 personals. The study focuses on geospatial
analysis and simulation of Shishper glacial avalanche of Hunza
basin. To simulate the potential glacial avalanche hazard to
Hassan Abad settlements, an empirical process based Glacier
Avalanche Model; Rapid Access Mass Movement Simulation
(RAMMS) is utilized. The model encompasses avalanche
release area and height for the execution of simulation. The
model output of Shishper glacial avalanche resulted; a max
pressure of 450 Kpa, max velocity of 40 m/s, and the max flow
height of 80m, while the resulted surge extent output was 2500m.
The potential hazardous Shishper glacial avalanche remains a
continuous hazard to Hassan Abad of Hunza valley including
Karakoram Highway and Frontier Works Organization (FWO)
camp. The study has resulted in identifying the Upper Indus
Bain (UIB) being more prone to glacial avalanche hazards
because of host factors in general and the anthropogenic factor
in particular.
Index Terms—Hazard, anthropogenic, glacial, simulation.
The authors are with IGIS, NUST, Pakistan (e-mail:
naseemphd13@igis.nust.edu.pk, javed@igis.nust.edu.pk,
ejaz@igis.nust.edu.pk).
Cite: N. Gilany, J. Iqbal, and E. Hussain, "Geospatial Analysis and Simulation of Glacial Avalanche Hazard in Hunza River Basin," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 51-57, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).