Amounts of insoluble light-absorbing particles (ILAPs) deposited on the surface of snow and ice can significantly reduce the snow albedo and accelerate the snow melting process. In this study, ~ 67 snow/ice samples were collected in 7 high mountain glaciers over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) regions from May 2013 to October 2015. The mixing ratio of black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC), and mineral dust (MD) was measured using an integrating sphere/integrating sandwich spectrophotometer (ISSW) system associated with the chemical analysis by assuming the light absorption of mineral dust due to iron oxide. The results indicate that mass mixing ratios of BC, ISOC, and MD show a large variation of 10–3100 ng g -1 , 10–17000 ng g -1 , 10–3500 ng g -1 , with a mean value of 218 ± 397 ng g -1 , 1357 ± 2417 ng g -1 , 241 ± 452 ng g -1 on TP glaciers during the entire snow field campaign, respectively. The chemical elements and the selected carbonaceous particles were also analyzed of the attributions of the particulate light absorption based on a positive matrix factorization (PMF) receptor model. On average, the industrial pollution (33.1 %), biomass/biofuel burning (29.4 %), and soil dust (37.5 %) were the major sources of the ILAPs in TP glaciers. Although the soil dust assumed to be the highest contributor to the mass loading of ILAPs, we noted that the averaged light absorption of BC (50.7 %) and ISOC (33.2 %) was largely responsible for the measured light absorption in the high mountain glaciers at the wavelengths of 450–600 nm.