ALBERT

Description: The Chilean Central Andes have been under severe hydrological stress due to the uninterrupted megadrought for the last 13 years. The region is known for being the denser populated zone of the country and it hosts a wide variety of glaciers along with the largest ice masses outside Patagonia.This work presents a susceptibility assessment for glacier hazards in the Rio Volcan basin (-32.82°/-70.00°), located 40 km east of Santiago city. The region is characterized for elevation ranges from 3380 to over 6000 m a.s.l. at the active and glacier-covered San José Volcanic Complex. Its closeness to the capital favours outdoor activities, tourism, urban and hydroelectric power development. Nowadays, there are accounted 195 glaciers in the area, including 46 glaciarets, 16 mountain glaciers and 8 valley glaciers.The susceptibility of 5 different phenomena is evaluated based on an analytical hierarchic process method through the determination of a susceptibility index. The multiple processes evaluated include ice avalanches, surges, low-angle glacier detachments, GLOFs and eruption-triggered lahars.The results show that within the Rio Volcan basin 4 glaciers are highly susceptible for ice avalanches, 1 for surges, 2 for sudden low-angle detachments, 3 for GLOFs whereas 19 glaciers, mainly glaciarets (68 %), are highly susceptible for eruption-triggered lahars. Only the 7 km-long Loma Larga glacier is highly susceptible for 4 out of 5 assessed processes excluding lahars.It is concluded that the proposed method can be used in other regions after adjustments regarding the work scale and conditioning factor’s weight are applied.