By: Laurie Fickman
A University of Houston scientist has teamed with international partners to examine how Antarctica's massive glaciers are shifting and how that could predict sea level changes. Their latest collaboration offers the most precise mapping to date in Antarctica of grounding lines, the points where glaciers lift from bedrock and begin to float on the ocean.
"Continuous monitoring of Antarctic evolution is important to understand ice sheet dynamics, minimizing uncertainties in sea level rise projections, and develop strategies to mitigate the risks posed by rising sea level," said Pietro Milillo, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. "This dataset provides the most detailed view yet of how Antarctica’s glaciers are interacting with the ocean. For the first time, we can monitor fast-flowing glaciers at a continental scale using high-frequency radar observations."
Milillo and the Italian Space Agency published their findings in Scientific Data, a Nature publication.
The paper presents an Antarctic grounding line dataset, manually mapped using Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) data. Over the years, various techniques have been developed for mapping grounding lines, but DInSAR stands out for its ability to operate under all weather conditions, and its proven effectiveness in continuously monitoring grounding lines and detecting their rapid migrations.
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