NEWS
2025-11-17
Height Distribution of Icebergs Around Antarctica
Editor： AI Songtao (Wuhan University, CHINA)
Recently, Professor Ai Songtao's research team from the China Antarctic Surveying and Mapping Research Center at Wuhan University has made significant progress in remote sensing monitoring of iceberg heights around Antarctica. They have successfully utilized multi-source optical satellite imagery and deep learning technology to systematically and automatically extract the heights of nearly 100000 icebergs around Antarctica, and for the first time, have revealed the spatiotemporal distribution patterns of iceberg heights on a large scale. This study provides a new technological path and key data support for solving the problem of dynamic monitoring of Antarctic icebergs.
For a long time, the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of the height of icebergs around Antarctica have been unclear. Due to the limited coverage of traditional observation methods and frequent dynamic changes of icebergs, the scientific community finds it difficult to fully grasp their spatial distribution and evolution laws. This cognitive gap not only hinders a deeper understanding of the interaction between glacier mass balance and global climate change, but also poses potential risks to the increasingly frequent safety of polar navigation.
This study innovatively used high-resolution optical satellite images as the main data source, combined with deep learning methods, to achieve automatic recognition and extraction of iceberg shadows. On this basis, the team established a geometric inversion model between the length of iceberg shadow and the true height, achieving large-scale and efficient automated acquisition of iceberg height. Based on this method, the research team successfully obtained height information of nearly 100000 icebergs in the circumAntarctic region, and based on this, drew a schematic diagram of the distribution point density of icebergs in the circumAntarctic region, systematically revealing the detailed spatiotemporal distribution pattern of iceberg height in the region.
This study is the first systematic inversion and statistical analysis of iceberg height on a large scale internationally. The high-quality dataset produced by it provides important basic data for further in-depth research on key scientific issues such as the evolution process of drift and melting of Antarctic icebergs, the distribution of icebergs and the interaction between ocean dynamics and glacier melting. At the same time, the research results also have important reference value for practical applications such as polar navigation route planning and navigation safety assurance.
Article Link：
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2025.2548005
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Figure3 Density distribution map of icebergs around Antarctica.png