A global inventory of rock glaciers

Abstract. Rock glaciers are among the most widespread visible expressions of ice-rich mountain permafrost. Although the significance of rock glaciers is relatively well understood at regional scales, differences among existing inventories in source data, interpretation criteria, mapping methods, and mapping scales hinder assessment of global rock glacier extent and distribution. Here we present the first rock glacier inventory built under a single, globally consistent mapping framework, produced by applying an ensemble of semantic-segmentation models to high-resolution (~2.4 m) satellite imagery, followed by expert manual post-processing and independent visual assessment. At 301 524 mapped polygons covering 38 849 km2 across 19 major mountain and high-latitude regions worldwide, this is, to our knowledge, the most spatially extensive rock glacier inventory compiled to date, with standardized topographic, climatic, and permafrost-related attributes attached to every polygon. Independent visual assessment of 3015 polygons yielded a feature-level precision of 90.9 % against the adopted morphological identification criteria, supporting the dataset's use as a global occurrence baseline. Mapped rock glaciers are strongly concentrated in a small number of major mountain systems and follow a coherent elevation-latitude structure worldwide, extending from low elevations in high-latitude mountains to above 4000 m in low- and mid-latitude ranges, with larger mapped areas on moderate slopes and poleward-facing aspects associated with cold to near-freezing modeled ground temperatures. Approximately 91.8 % of the mapped area coincides with independently modeled permafrost-potential terrain, providing a consistency check against modeled permafrost conditions. The polygon boundaries mapped under common criteria and standardized environmental attributes enable cross-regional comparison, support evaluation of mountain permafrost indicators, provide a spatial basis for prioritizing field and kinematic observations, and help identify mountain systems where hidden ice, long-term water storage, and permafrost-related geomorphic activity may require closer attention in a warming climate. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.11888/Cryos.tpdc.303562 (Xu et al., 2026).