Glacial and periglacial geomorphology of Ovit Valley; An evaluation in the light of current data and methods

The Ovit Glacial Valley is a two-segment "U-shaped" valley reaching out between the İkizdere and İspir districts in the southern part of the Eastern Black Sea Mountains glaciation area. The paleoglacier that shaped this valley has reached a total length of 30 km and an area of 89 km2 in the northern and southern segments, forming one of the largest glacial valleys in Turkey. The landforms left by Ovit Paleoglacier are also quite large in parallel with the scale of the valley. The most important landforms among these are moraines with a length of kilometers and a height of several hundred meters, glacial deposits such as tills outcropping in a wide area and at different altitudes, and erosional forms such as deep glacial troughs, cirques and horns. The hummocky and frontal moraine structures, which are the traces of the cold periods that took place after the maximum glaciation of the Ovit Valley, represent the young moraine structures in the valley and constitute significant evidence of more than one glaciation in the valley. In the high parts of the Ovit Valley, where periglacial conditions prevail today, permafrost structures such as solifluction lobes, rock glaciers and thermokarstic collapse lake formed on the rock glacier are widely seen. In the valley where there is no actual glacier, rock glaciers are still active today, and tongue elevations reaching 2880 m shed light on the discontinuous mountain permafrost minimum limit of the valley. The 85 m diameter thermokarstic collapse and the lake at its base, which outcrops about 15 m of ice cores on the Kuklar rock glacier, is a rare example that was formed between 2010 and 2015. Within the scope of this thesis, the morphometric features of these landforms have been determined with current data and methods (field studies, photogrammetry with UAV, red relief map-RRIM, paleoglacial model). It is thought that findings that will shed light on the glacial chronology in the Eastern Black Sea Mountains can be reached with a dating study to be carried out in the southern and northern segments of the Ovit Glacier Valley, which was seen to have been under the influence of a major glaciation in the past. In addition, the formation of thermokarst on the rock glacier reveals the necessity of monitoring the rock glaciers here and necessitates investigating whether they are related to global climate change.