Antarctica CCI+ - Calving Front Location

Region: Antarctica

Duration: 2 yr (April 2023 - April 2025)

Collaboration partner: Northumbria University

75% of Antarctica’s coastline is fringed with floating masses of ice called ice shelves. Observations from the last four decades have shown that although retreat and advance form part of an ice shelf’s natural cycle, more ice shelves are retreating, leading to large-scale collapse events. 5 out of 12 ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed since 1989 (Cook et al., 2010), and a section of the ice tongue (a narrow, fast-flowing ice shelf) extending from the largest glacier in the world, Thwaites Glacier, has collapsed (read more here)

Image: Larsen C ice shelf from Landsat 9 optical imagery (left) and Sentinel-1 imagery (right). The Calving front is delineated in green.

Image: Calving of iceberg A-81 from Brunt-Stancomb ice shelf. The iceberg calved on the 22nd January 2023 and its size is comparable to the area of Greater London. Image acquired from Sentinel-1 on the 28th January, 2023.