Submarine Ice-Shelf Melt

Much of West Antarctica’s observed mass loss since the early 1990s is linked to submarine melting of ice shelves. Our group is developing methods that use time series of high-resolution stereo satellite imagery to map elevation change over floating ice shelves. Images can be combined to produce digital elevation models (DEM) of the ice shelf sheet surface, which can then be co-registered and differenced to produce estimates of basal melt rates. High resolution maps of submarine melt can then be used to initialize ocean cavity models and understand the drivers of heat transport to the ice-ocean interface.