Project Details
Projekt
Unlocking the glaciological information of historical aerial imagery to obtain long-term glacier mass balance information and to identify drivers of glacier changes on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Applicant
Dr. Thorsten Seehaus
Subject Area
Physical Geography
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502049004
The Antarctic Peninsula is a hot spot of global warming and leading to considerable changes in its ice sheet and outlet glaciers. Pronounced glacier recession has been reported since the 1950s throughout the Antarctic Peninsula and many of its ice shelves disintegrated or significantly retreated within the last decades. Consequently, the ice masses of the Antarctic Peninsula contribute significantly to global sea-level rise. However, estimates of the mass budget of the Antarctic Peninsula are subjected to considerable uncertainties due to various issues. Moreover, long-term information on the evolution of the mass balances exists only for a very limited amount of glaciers.Since the 1950s, various aerial campaigns were carried out to map the Antarctic Peninsula. The acquired photogrammetric imagery poses a “time capsule” of information on the historic glacier states. Thus, we aim within this project to unlock this information from the historic aerial imagery by applying state-of-the-art photogrammetric analysis techniques to reconstruct the former glacier surface elevations. The analysis will be supported by providing precise ground control points, which will be acquired during a joint aerial survey with AWI and DLR in late 2022. By combining the information revealed from the historic imagery with recent surface elevation information from the German bistatic SAR mission TanDEM-X, the computation of long-term glacier volume and mass changes on the Antarctic Peninsula will be facilitated. Finally, all available information on glacier changes will be correlated with oceanic, atmospheric, and glacier geometry parameters in order to identify driving factors of the revealed glacier variations. This information will facilitate a better understanding of the ongoing processes and interaction between the different spheres, and will be highly beneficial for projections of glacier evolution on the AP Ice Sheet and future sea-level rise contribution.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
