19/11/2024
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As Arctic temperatures rise, marine-terminating glaciers—particularly in locations like Svalbard—are present process speedy retreat and intensified calving.
The ESA-funded House for Shore venture utilises radar knowledge from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission to supply exact, year-over-year insights into glacier retreat and calving depth, significantly in areas like Kongsfjorden, the place notable glaciers are experiencing important retreat.
Calving, the method of which ice breaks off from a glacier terminus, is a serious contributor to sea-level rise and poses rising dangers to coastal areas worldwide. Understanding these processes, significantly within the Arctic, is important for predicting future impacts.
By a latest section of the House for Shore venture—a collaboration between I-SEA (France) and NORCE (Norway)—scientists have utilised over a thousand picture acquisitions from the Sentinel-1 mission to watch the evolution of Svalbard’s coastal glaciers intimately.
By analysing Sentinel-1 knowledge from 2015 to 2023, the group has mapped glacier entrance traces and measured calving exercise throughout Svalbard’s summer season months, when calving intensities are at their highest.
Sentinel-1, a part of the European Union’s Copernicus program, makes use of artificial aperture radar (SAR) know-how to seize high-resolution knowledge underneath difficult Arctic situations, guaranteeing constant, year-round monitoring of those crucial glaciers.
A key discovering from the evaluation is the yearly extent of glacier fronts. By inspecting photos captured between July and September, researchers have outlined summer season glacier fronts as areas the place glacier extent is maintained 95% of the time throughout these months.
Moreover, by detecting the radar reflection from floating icebergs and growlers, they’ve developed a proxy for summer season calving depth: summers with increased prevalence of icebergs and growlers—a time period for smaller ice fragments that break off from glaciers—point out extra lively calving and accelerated glacier retreat, that are crucial indicators of a glacier’s well being and stability.
In Kongsfjorden, a key examine space, notable glaciers like Kronebreen and Kongsvegen present important modifications. Within the animation above, the sequence of day by day Sentinel-1 observations had been used to categorise the area into areas of glacier, iceberg and growler occurence in Kronebukta (Krone Bay) for the summers from 2015 to 2023.
Jörg Haarpaintner, from NORCE, explains, “As a substitute of a snapshot of a glacier entrance place, the Sentinel-1 methodology offers a statistically outlined composite of the summer season glacier entrance positions and calving intensities, revealing the dynamic interactions between ice and ocean over time.”
Manon Tranchand, lead researcher on the venture, provides, “This evaluation offers us a transparent image of present modifications in Arctic glaciers, and so they’re essential for predicting the longer term impacts of local weather change on these delicate areas
“With out the constant, high-resolution knowledge from Sentinel-1, monitoring these dynamic ice-ocean interactions wouldn’t be attainable. Ongoing warming is prone to speed up ice loss, and our knowledge present how that might contribute to international sea-level rise. Sentinel-1’s capabilities permit us to seize these shifts with unprecedented accuracy.”
Wanting forward, the upcoming launch of Sentinel-1C subsequent month marks a major step ahead within the monitoring of Arctic glaciers and international local weather impacts.
As the following addition to the Sentinel-1 mission, Sentinel-1C will present enhanced radar imaging capabilities and improved continuity for crucial local weather analysis. With its superior know-how, Sentinel-1C will strengthen our potential to seize detailed, year-round knowledge on glacier entrance traces, calving charges and ice-ocean interactions, even within the difficult situations of the Arctic.
