Abstract: To further study the climatic issue, taking the Geladandong glacier as the object and employing remote sensing and geographical information technology, the glacier variation condition in Geladandong, a source area of Yangtze River, was studied. Based on the collected images of Landsat-TM and Landsat8-OLI_TIRS, DEM and glacier inventory data in 1992, 2002, 2009, 2015, the CART decision tree was applied to extract the information of Geladandong glacier, so the change analysis on the glacier areas in 3 periods of 1992~2002, 2002~2009, 2009~2015 was carried out. The analysis showed that the glacial area of the Geladandong retreated 78.97 km2, accounting 8.6% of the total glacial area; the glaciers distributed between the elevation of 5200 m to 6600 m, and the upper retreat limit of the glacier was 5800 m. In addition, the glacier inclination influence and length variation were studied. The study concluded that the glacier retreat caused by the global warming would continue.