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- Title
Glacier changes in the Chhombo Chhu Watershed of the Tista basin between 1975 and 2018, the Sikkim Himalaya, India.
- Authors
Chowdhury, Arindam; Sharma, Milap Chand; Kumar De, Sunil; Debnath, Manasi
- Abstract
Glaciers of the Tista basin represent an important water source for mountain communities and a large population downstream. The article presents observable changes in the Chhombo Chhu Watershed (CCW) glacier area of the Tista basin, the Sikkim Himalaya. The CCW contains 74 glaciers (> 0.02 km 2) with a mean glacier size of 0.61 km 2. We determined changes in glaciers from the declassified Hexagon Keyhole-9 (KH-9) (1975), Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) (1989), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM +) (2000), Landsat 5 TM (2010), and Sentinel-2A (2018) images. The total glacier area in 1975 was 62.6 ± 0.7 km 2 ; and by 2018, the area had decreased to 44.8 ± 1.5 km 2 , an area loss of 17.9 ± 1.7 km 2 (0.42 ± 0.04 km 2 a -1). Clean glaciers exhibited more area loss of 11.8 ± 1.2 km 2 (0.27 ± 0.03 km 2 a -1) than partially debris-covered and maximally debris-covered glaciers. The area loss is 5.0 ± 0.4 km 2 (0.12 ± 0.01 km 2 a -1) for partially covered glaciers and 1.0 ± 0.1 km 2 (-0.02 ± 0.002 km 2 a -1) for maximally covered glaciers. The glacier area loss in the CCW of the Sikkim Himalaya is 0.62 ± 0.5 km 2 a -1 during 2000–2010, and it is 0.77 ± 0.6 km 2 a -1 during 2010–2018. Field investigations of selected glaciers and climatic records also support the glacier recession in the CCW due to a significant increase in temperature (0.25 ∘ C a -1) and more or less static precipitation since 1995. The dataset is now available from the Zenodo web portal: 10.5281/zenodo.4457183 (Chowdhury et al., 2021).
- Subjects
GLACIERS; ALPINE glaciers; WEB portals; WATERSHEDS
- Publication
Earth System Science Data, 2021, Vol 13, Issue 6, p2923
- ISSN
1866-3508
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5194/essd-13-2923-2021