19/11/2024
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As Arctic temperatures rise, marine-terminating glaciers—notably in places like Svalbard—are current course of speedy retreat and intensified calving.
The ESA-funded Home for Shore problem utilises radar info from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission to produce actual, year-over-year insights into glacier retreat and calving depth, considerably in areas like Kongsfjorden, the place notable glaciers are experiencing very important retreat.
Calving, the tactic of which ice breaks off from a glacier terminus, is a big contributor to sea-level rise and poses rising risks to coastal areas worldwide. Understanding these processes, considerably inside the Arctic, is essential for predicting future impacts.
By way of a present part of the Home for Shore problem—a collaboration between I-SEA (France) and NORCE (Norway)—scientists have utilised over a thousand image acquisitions from the Sentinel-1 mission to look at the evolution of Svalbard’s coastal glaciers intimately.
By analysing Sentinel-1 info from 2015 to 2023, the crew has mapped glacier entrance traces and measured calving train all through Svalbard’s summer season season months, when calving intensities are at their highest.
Sentinel-1, part of the European Union’s Copernicus program, makes use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) know-how to grab high-resolution info beneath tough Arctic circumstances, making sure fixed, year-round monitoring of these very important glaciers.
A key discovering from the analysis is the yearly extent of glacier fronts. By inspecting images captured between July and September, researchers have outlined summer season season glacier fronts as areas the place glacier extent is maintained 95% of the time all through these months.
Furthermore, by detecting the radar reflection from floating icebergs and growlers, they’ve developed a proxy for summer season season calving depth: summers with larger prevalence of icebergs and growlers—a time interval for smaller ice fragments that break off from glaciers—level out additional energetic calving and accelerated glacier retreat, which might be very important indicators of a glacier’s properly being and stability.
In Kongsfjorden, a key analysis area, notable glaciers like Kronebreen and Kongsvegen current very important changes. Inside the animation above, the gathering of daily Sentinel-1 observations have been used to classify the realm into areas of glacier, iceberg and growler occurence in Kronebukta (Krone Bay) for the summers from 2015 to 2023.
Jörg Haarpaintner, from NORCE, explains, “In its place of a snapshot of a glacier entrance place, the Sentinel-1 methodology offers a statistically outlined composite of the summer season season glacier entrance positions and calving intensities, revealing the dynamic interactions between ice and ocean over time.”
Manon Tranchand, lead researcher on the problem, offers, “This analysis presents us a clear picture of current changes in Arctic glaciers, and they also’re important for predicting the long term impacts of native climate change on these delicate areas
“With out the fixed, high-resolution info from Sentinel-1, monitoring these dynamic ice-ocean interactions wouldn’t be potential. Ongoing warming is extra more likely to velocity up ice loss, and our info current how that might contribute to world sea-level rise. Sentinel-1’s capabilities allow us to grab these shifts with unprecedented accuracy.”
Attempting ahead, the upcoming launch of Sentinel-1C subsequent month marks a significant step forward inside the monitoring of Arctic glaciers and world native climate impacts.
As the next addition to the Sentinel-1 mission, Sentinel-1C will current enhanced radar imaging capabilities and improved continuity for very important native climate evaluation. With its superior know-how, Sentinel-1C will strengthen our capability to grab detailed, year-round info on glacier entrance traces, calving costs and ice-ocean interactions, even inside the tough circumstances of the Arctic.
