Arctic landscape transitions: ice cap and terrestrial margins across Hofsjökull, Iceland

Dramatic shifts in sea and terrestrial ice coverage across the Arctic has prompted urgent calls for systematic glacier and ice cap monitoring efforts. We use satellite-derived data from NASA’s Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensor to focus on landscape-level changes to Iceland’s dome-shaped Hofsjökull ice cap and its surrounding over a recent twenty-five year period, from 1992 to 2017. We offer a practicable technique using available moderate resolution satellite data with a relatively long historical record to monitor changes to Hofsjökull and its surrounding. Our analysis reveals substantial shifts in snow, ice cover, and vegetation over the study period. Observed is a twenty-three percent decrease in the spatial extent of snow and ice between the two years. The ice front margin has receded along the entire periphery of the ice cap, with an average retreat of 743 m across a sample of transects. In a few cases, the retreat is more than one kilometer from the 1992 margin. Employing an automated machine learning technique to analyze satellite data can reduce errors, allow for systematic frequent assessments and provide urgently needed finer-scale spatio-temporal records across the rapidly changing Arctic.