Fig. 1.

a Advancing and surging glaciers (in black) in the Central Chilean and Argentinean Andes during the period of 2004–2007. Examples of glacier mass relocation and frontal progress is shown in the panels b–e. Between March and November of 2007, Grande del Nevado del Plomo Glacier advanced ~ 3 km with a maximum velocity of ~ 33 m/day (e). If an ice dam is formed in a future surge, potentially controversial methods, such as blasting, could be used to open a channel in the ice dam. Elevation change derived from SRTM and TanDem-X digital elevation models (DEM). DEMs were co-registered following Nuth and Kääb (2011) before elevation change estimation