Evidence for accelerating glacier ice loss in the Takht’e Solaiman Mountains of Iran from 1955 to 2010

Abstract

This study reports on the clean ice area and surface elevation changes of the Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers in the north of Iran between 1955 and 2010 based on several high to medium spatial resolution remote sensing data. The object-oriented classification technique has been applied to nine remote sensing images to estimate the debris-free areas. The satellite-based analysis revealed that the clean ice areas of Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers shrank since 2010 with an overall area decrease of about 45% and 60% respectively. It means that the dramatic proportions of 1955 glaciers surface area are covered with debris during the last five decades. Although the general trend is a clean ice area decrease, some advancement is observed over the period of 1997–2004. During 1987–1991 the maximum decrease in the clean ice area was observed. However, the clean ice area had steadily increased between 1997 and 2010. To quantify the elevation changes besides the debris-free change analysis, several Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were extracted from aerial photo (1955), topographic map (1997), ASTER image (2002) and Worldview-2 image (2010) and after it a 3-D Coregistration and a linear relationship adjustments techniques were used to remove the systematic shifts and elevation dependent biases. Unlike the sinusoidal variation of our case studies which was inferred from planimetric analysis, the elevation change results revealed that the glacier surface lowering has occurred during 1955–2010 continuously without any thickening with the mean annual thinning of about 0.4 ± 0.04 m per year and 0.3 ± 0.026 m per year for Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers, respectively. The maximum thinning rate has been observed during 1997–2002 (about 1.1 ± 0.09 per year and 0.96 ± 0.01 mper year, respectively), which was compatible partially with debris-free change analysis. The present result demonstrates that although in debris-covered glaciers clean ice area change analysis can illustrate the direction of changes (retreat or advance), due to the high uncertainty in glacier area delineation in such glaciers, it cannot reveal the actual glacier changes. Thus, both planimetric and volumetric change analyses are very critical to obtain accurate glacier variation results.