Damage accelerates ice shelf instability and mass loss in Amundsen Sea Embayment

Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier in the Amundsen Sea Embayment are among the fastest changing outlet glaciers in West Antarctica with large consequences for global sea level. Yet, assessing how much and how fast both glaciers will weaken if these changes continue remains a major uncertainty as many of the processes that control their...

Remote Sensing of Surface Melt on Antarctica: Opportunities and Challenges

Surface melt is an important driver of ice shelf disintegration and its consequent mass loss over the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Monitoring surface melt using satellite remote sensing can enhance our understanding of ice shelf stability. However, the sensors do not measure the actual physical process of surface melt, but rather observe the presence...

Mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 1992 to 2020

Ice losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have accelerated since the 1990s, accounting for a significant increase in the global mean sea level. Here, we present a new 29-year record of ice sheet mass balance from 1992 to 2020 from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE). We compare and combine 50 independent...

A high-resolution record of surface melt on Antarctic ice shelves using multi-source remote sensing data and deep learning

While the influence of surface melt on Antarctic ice shelf stability can be large, the duration and affected area of melt events are often small. Therefore, melt events are difficult to capture with remote sensing, as satellite sensors always face the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution. To overcome this limitation, we developed...

Systematic errors observed in CryoSat-2 elevation swaths on mountain glaciers and their implications

Our awareness of ice caps' and mountain glaciers' sensitivity to climate change has driven major advances in the application of remote sensing techniques during the past decade. Regarding ESA's SARIn altimeter CryoSat-2, processing the full waveform to generate swaths of elevation estimates has become standard practice in regions of complex...