With the support of the project "investigation of glacier resources and their changes in Western China" launched by the Ministry of science and technology in 2006, researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Cryosphere science, Institute of cold and arid region environment and engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, began to compile the second glacier catalogue using the latest remote sensing data. The second China glacier catalogue adopts the current international common remote sensing and GIS methods, using the Landsat TM / ETM + remote sensing satellite data of the United States as the main data source for glacier boundary description, and SRTM V4 data as the data source for glacier elevation attribute extraction. The method of glacier boundary extraction in bare ice area adopts the internationally recognized high-efficiency band ratio threshold segmentation method, and uses the self-developed glacier ridge line extraction method to extract glacier and distinguish ice ridge. Combined with the manual revision of the results, the final glacier boundary data is formed. At the same time, based on the general GIS algorithm, the geometric attributes such as the area and perimeter of the glacier and the maximum, minimum and average elevation attributes are calculated. The validation results of field GPS Survey and high-resolution remote sensing images show that the glacier boundary obtained by the method used in the second China catalogue has high positioning accuracy and glacier area accuracy, which can meet the accuracy requirements of all walks of life for glacier cataloging data. By the end of 2013, China's second glacial catalogue based on Landsat images had completed the glacier cataloguing in 86% of the western region, with 42370 glaciers interpreted, covering a total area of 43102.58km2. The unfinished part is mainly located in the Hengduan Mountain Area in the southeast of Qinghai Tibet Plateau and the Middle East section of Nianqing Tanggula Mountain. Due to the influence of Indian monsoon, these areas have very high precipitation and are covered by snow and clouds all the year round. Most of the available high-quality remote sensing images were taken between 2000 and 2005. In order to ensure the time consistency of the results, the glacier cataloguing in these areas is not based on these images. At present, the glacier catalogue in these areas is still in the process of compilation based on the latest landsat-8 / oli sensor data, and will be released to the public after the compilation. In the current data set of the second glacier catalogue, the data of the southeast of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau and other unfinished areas are replaced by the latest digitized and updated first glacier catalogue data set (Xu Junli et al. In review), 6201 glaciers with an area of 8753.5km2 in the first catalogue data set are used.