Glacier changes in the Chhombo Chhu Watershed of the Tista basin between 1975 and 2018, the Sikkim Himalaya, India

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 (>g 0.02g km2) with a mean glacier size of 0.61g km2. 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 62.6g ±g 0.7g km2; and by 2018, the area had decreased to 44.8g ±g 1.5g km2, an area loss of 17.9g ±g 1.7g km2 (0.42g ±g 0.04g km2g a-1). Clean glaciers exhibited more area loss of 11.8g ±g 1.2g km2 (0.27g ±g 0.03g km2g a-1) than partially debris-covered and maximally debris-covered glaciers. The area loss is 5.0g ±g 0.4g km2 (0.12g ±g 0.01g km2g a-1) for partially covered glaciers and 1.0g ±g 0.1g km2 (-0.02g ±g 0.002g km2g a-1) for maximally covered glaciers. The glacier area loss in the CCW of the Sikkim Himalaya is 0.62g ±g 0.5g km2g a-1 during 2000-2010, and it is 0.77g ±g 0.6g km2g 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 (0.25g g Cg 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).