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Flowing Antarctic Ice Mapped 10 Times More Accurately Far more
accurate than any previous map, this new representation of glacier flows in
Antarctica opens the door to an improved understanding of the vast continent
and the future pace of sea level rise. To create the new map, researchers at
the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California, combined input from six different satellite missions
dating from 1994 to the present.
All earlier
maps of glacier flow speeds have estimated the speeds largely by tracking the
movement of visible features like patches of dirt on the ice surface, but these
new maps rely mainly on observations that use a technique called synthetic
aperture radar interferometry, which is much more sensitive to the motion of
the ice itself. By combining observations from multiple satellites passing over
the continent in different directions, the researchers produced a map that is
not only 10 times more accurate than any previous map but also shows speeds for
far more of the slow-moving ice on the continental interior than ever before.
The map was
published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and may be
downloaded at the NASA Distributed Active
Archive Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
For a full
version of this story, see
https://news.uci.edu/2019/07/29/uci-jpl-glaciologists-unveil-most-precise-map-ever-of-antarctic-ice-velocity/
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