As glaciers retreat due to a rise in global temperatures, one study shows detailed 3D elevation models could drastically improve predictions about how they react to Earth's warming climate.
While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world's ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet's temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.
To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.
Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan) had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.
Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.
"This is something that we've been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it's difficult to get data out of remote areas," said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State's Translational Data Analytics Institute. "What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data."
The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.
According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team's work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.
The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.
In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.
Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study's algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.
In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.
"Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this," said Qin.
Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work's data was provided by PlanetScope.
