Description: Rock glaciers are widespread in the Tien Shan. However, rock glaciers in the Chinese part of the Tien Shan have not been systematically investigated for more than two decades. In this study, we propose a new method that combines SAR interferometry and optical images from Google Earth to map active rock glaciers (ARGs) in the Northern Tien Shan (NTS) of China. We compiled an inventory that includes 261 ARGs and quantitative information about their locations, geomorphic parameters, and down-slope velocities. Our inventory shows that most of the ARGs are moraine-derived (69 %) and facing northeast (56 %). The altitude distribution of ARGs in the western NTS is significantly different from those located in the eastern part. The down-slope velocities of the ARGs vary significantly in space, with a maximum of about 114 cm/yr and a mean of about 37 cm/yr. Using the ARG locations as a proxy for the extent of alpine permafrost, our inventory suggests that the lowest altitudinal limit for the presence of permafrost in the NTS is about 2500-2800 m, a range determined by the lowest ARG in the entire inventory and by a statistics-based estimation. The successful application of the proposed method would facilitate effective and robust efforts to map rock glaciers over mountain ranges globally. And this study provides an important dataset to improve mapping and modeling permafrost occurrence in vast western China.

Description: The dataset is a rock glacier inventory of the West Kunlun Mountains of China. It contains the boundaries of the landforms, their geometric information, and kinematic data. The inventory has been compiled followed the IPA guidelines on mapping rock glaciers. Remote sensing data adopted to produce this dataset includes optical images (Google Earth and Sentinel-2 images) and Interferometric SAR (InSAR) images (ALOS-1 PALSAR). Both manual inspection and deep learning-powered automatic detection have been used to identify and delineate the landforms. The geometric information of the inventoried landforms has been derived from SRTM DEM and Tandem-X DEM. The kinematic data has been quantified from ALOS-1 PALSAR data during 2006–2010. Specific temporal coverage for each displacement rate is included in the attribute table of the ESRI Shapefile. It is the first rock glacier inventory of the arid West Kunlun region, aiming to provide the baseline knowledge of these ice-rich landforms for long-term monitoring in the warming climate.

Description: The Earth climate system is out of energy balance, and heat has accumulated continuously over the past decades, warming the ocean, the land, the cryosphere, and the atmosphere. According to the Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this planetary warming over multiple decades is human-driven and results in unprecedented and committed changes to the Earth system, with adverse impacts for ecosystems and human systems. The Earth heat inventory provides a measure of the Earth energy imbalance (EEI) and allows for quantifying how much heat has accumulated in the Earth system, as well as where the heat is stored. Here we show that the Earth system has continued to accumulate heat, with 381±61 ZJ accumulated from 1971 to 2020. This is equivalent to a heating rate (i.e., the EEI) of 0.48±0.1 W m−2. The majority, about 89 %, of this heat is stored in the ocean, followed by about 6 % on land, 1 % in the atmosphere, and about 4 % available for melting the cryosphere. Over the most recent period (2006–2020), the EEI amounts to 0.76±0.2 W m−2. The Earth energy imbalance is the most fundamental global climate indicator that the scientific community and the public can use as the measure of how well the world is doing in the task of bringing anthropogenic climate change under control. Moreover, this indicator is highly complementary to other established ones like global mean surface temperature as it represents a robust measure of the rate of climate change and its future commitment. We call for an implementation of the Earth energy imbalance into the Paris Agreement's Global Stocktake based on best available science. The Earth heat inventory in this study, updated from von Schuckmann et al. (2020), is underpinned by worldwide multidisciplinary collaboration and demonstrates the critical importance of concerted international efforts for climate change monitoring and community-based recommendations and we also call for urgently needed actions for enabling continuity, archiving, rescuing, and calibrating efforts to assure improved and long-term monitoring capacity of the global climate observing system. The data for the Earth heat inventory are publicly available, and more details are provided in Table 4.