Project Objectives

• Improved numbers on mass balance and sea level contribution of outlet glaciers, and temporal changes of mass balance since ice shelf collapse
• Supply data to analyse dynamic processes leading to acceleration of outlet glaciers after ice shelf disintegration
• Detection of possible pre-cursors of ice shelf disintegration

Area of interest

• The region under investigation in this study comprises an area of about 15,000 km² on the east coast of the northern Antarctic Peninsula along the Weddell Sea coast
• This region has undergone particularly rapid changes in recent decades following the disintegration of several large buttressing ice shelves leaving their former tributary glaciers exposed as tide water glaciers and in imbalance
• Under investigation are all major glacier catchments stretching from Prince Gustav Channel to Jason Peninsula, including the Larsen A and Larsen B embayment and its remnant part in SCAR Inlet

Period of Interest

• From the early 90's until the present

Data

• Complete time series of archived SAR satellite data from ERS-1 and ERS-2, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, ENVISAT, ALOS
• Newly acquired data from TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X & CryoSat-2
• Complemented by available airborne (NASA Operation Ice Bridge) and in situ GPS data (BAS)

Related Projects

• The APMB (Antarctic Peninsula Mass Balance) project will provide an improved estimate of Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet mass balance from satellite techniques by increasing the spatial extent and time period.

last updated Fri. April 21, 2015