GIS inventory of glacial lakes in the Altai Mountains within Russia, Mongolia and China

Since the Little Ice Age, the altitudinal and latitudinal range of the Earth's cryogenic formations has been steadily narrowing and expressed in a progressive reduction of the glaciosphere.  A characteristic element of landscapes of the Altai (Russian, Mongolian, Chinese) periglacial belt, as an area with actively shrinking glaciation, are complexes of polygenic and polymorphic lake water bodies, the number of which increases in proportion to the rate of glaciation reduction. Glacial lakes are usually classified as distant geological hazards. Glacial lakes contain a store of water which under certain conditions can have an enor- mous destructive force. Therefore mountain lakes should be classified as particularly dangerous sources of natural disasters.There is currently no detailed catalogue of glacial lakes in the Altai, so it is crucial to carry out an inven- tory and survey of glacial lakes to obtain data on potentially dangerous lakes that could trigger floods and cause harm to the population of the downstream river valleys. For systematization, analytical processing and display of spatially coordinated data on glacial lakes in the Altai, we have developed the GIS «GL Altai». Microdem/TerraBaseII V12.0 and Global Mapper V16.0