Thwaites’ crevasses in motion

Scientists have developed a new Artificial Intelligence, or AI, technique using radar images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite mission, to reveal how the Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue in West Antarctica is being damaged by squeezing and stretching as it flows from the middle of the continent to the coast. Being able to track fractures and crevasses in the ice beneath the overlying snow is key to better predicting the fate of floating ice tongues under climate change.

The animation shows annual fracture maps generated by applying a trained neural network to Copernicus Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images acquired each March between 2016 and 2021.

Read full story: Sentinel-1 and AI uncover glacier crevasses