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The sediment record of Disenchantment Bay, Southern Alaska, a large marine calving embayment, contains distinctive annual deposits. Each year a glacimarine couplet forms with a clast-rich stratified to massive diamicton deposited in winter by intense iceberg rafting and a summer, meltwater deposit of thinly laminated mud and turbidite sand beds. Although iceberg rafting occurs throughout the year, coarse debris is deposited in high concentrations and forms diamicton only during the winter because of minimal fine sediment from meltwater discharges and a longer residence time of icebergs in the Bay due to winter fjord circulation and meteorological factors. When meltwater discharge commences in summer, laminated mud with dropstones is deposited. Spring and fall conditions are recorded a transitional phases between winter and summer by clast-poor diamictons. Average sediment accumulation rates calculated from varve thicknesses range from 48 cm/yr, 3.4 km from Hubbard Glacier at the head of the Bay, to 14 cm/yr, 15 km away. Sediment accumulation rates estimated from 210Pb dating of core sediments are in the same range. Deposits from the 1986 Russell Fiord outburst flood are identified from anomalously high 210Pb activities in sediments indicating an alternative sediment source to Disenchantment Bay. Glacimarine varves are a dating tool for the barren proximal sediments commonly deposited near calving glacier termini. They yield paleoclimatic information because they are a product of both glacial ice in the sea and laminated sediments deposited from significant melt-water discharge found in a temperate to subpolar climate.

Three distinct phenomena related to sudden lake drainage, which occurred in a restricted area within the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia, are described: (i) moraine breaching by solitary wave action following an icefall into a lake; (ii) failure of a glacier ice dam by flotation and melting to produce a ‘glacier outburst’ flood or ‘jökulhlaup;’ (iii) debris torrent following a moraine breach. The possibility for a fourth failure phenomenon: moraine failure by piping, is discussed. A first attempt to develop practical hazard evaluation methods before the event, which relies on simple scale relations or index relations developed from experience of events elsewhere, is presented. Key words: dam break, debris flow, hazard evaluation, jökulhlaup, lakes, lake drainage.

Lake Donjek was a large reservoir formed when Donjek Glacier dammed Donjek River. Although the basin is empty at present, a minor advance of Donjek Glacier could again dam the river and impound approximately 234 × 106 m3 of water. Ice-dammed lakes are commonly unstable, giving rise to destructive floods called "jökulhlaups," or glacier outburst floods. Our aim in this paper is to estimate the likely magnitude of outburst floods from Lake Donjek so that the danger to downstream installations can be assessed.In attempting to estimate the maximum discharge from Lake Donjek, we use both the empirical formula of Clague and Mathews and a computer simulation model based on theoretical contributions by Nye. The September 1967 outburst flood from Summit Lake, B.C. is taken as a reference event against which predictions of the simulation model are compared. Our estimates for peak discharge from Lake Donjek lie in the range 677–5968 m3 s−1 with values in the range 3968–5968 m3 s−1 being considered most probable.

The Cordillera Blanca in Peru has been the scene of rapid deglaciation for many decades. One of numerous lakes formed in the front of the retreating glaciers is the moraine-dammed Lake Palcacocha, which drained suddenly due to an unknown cause in 1941. The resulting Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) led to dam failure and complete drainage of Lake Jircacocha downstream, and to major destruction and thousands of fatalities in the city of Huaráz at a distance of 23 km. We chose an integrated approach to revisit the 1941 event in terms of topographic reconstruction and numerical back-calculation with the GIS-based open-source mass flow/process chain simulation framework r.avaflow, which builds on an enhanced version of the Pudasaini (2012) two-phase flow model. Thereby we consider four scenarios: (A) and (AX) breach of the moraine dam of Lake Palcacocha due to retrogressive erosion, assuming two different fluid characteristics; (B) failure of the moraine dam caused by the impact of a landslide on the lake; and (C) geomechanical failure and collapse of the moraine dam. The simulations largely yield empirically adequate results with physically plausible parameters, taking the documentation of the 1941 event and previous calculations of future scenarios as reference. Most simulation scenarios indicate travel times between 36 and 70 min to reach Huaráz, accompanied with peak discharges above 10 000 m3 s−1. The results of the scenarios indicate that the most likely initiation mechanism would be retrogressive erosion, possibly triggered by a minor impact wave and/or facilitated by a weak stability condition of the moraine dam. However, the involvement of Lake Jircacocha disguises part of the signal of process initiation farther downstream. Predictive simulations of possible future events have to be based on a larger set of back-calculated GLOF process chains, taking into account the expected parameter uncertainties and appropriate strategies to deal with critical threshold effects.