Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2025 number 5

Given the dispersion and dynamism of the Asian Russia’ modern nival glacial geosystems, it seems advisable to draw up a map reflecting the spatial areas of concentration of relief characteristics that contribute to the emergence and stability of modern glaciation under a certain climatic regime. Fragments of publicly available digital terrain models processed by the basic SAGA software are used to automatically calculate such characteristics. These indicators are: the general hypsometry, the predominant exposure of the slopes, and the internal dissection of the ridges. The latter characteristic is an integral indicator, including the distance between the watersheds and the steepness of the slopes. The distance between watersheds is calculated by automatically calculating the distance of each point in space from the nearest point (Overland Flow Distance to Channel Network tool) and manually linking reference points and known vertices. Thus, at the level of macro-regions, areas with the presence of modern glaciation are designated, and at the level of the main basins and larger areas with a combination of relief characteristics are reflected, under which glaciers are able to maintain their condition. This allows us to identify areas with geomorphological preconditions for the stability of the modern glaciation of Asian Russia on different scales and for different user challenges.