Lecture: 'Unlocking the Archive': Antarctic Peninsula Glacial change

Speaker: Dr Lucy Clarke, University of Gloucestershire

Entry Fee

Members: Free

Visitors: £5.00

Date and Time

19:30 -

Location

Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN


Lecture Description

The Antarctic Peninsula is a mountain glacier system comprised of over 400 glaciers, and is an important contributor to historical and future sea level rise. Assessment and monitoring of Antarctic Peninsula glaciers is crucial for understanding sensitivity to climate change. Changes to glacier fronts and ice shelves and glacier acceleration are well documented, but there are almost no data on mass changes on the Antarctic Peninsula. Satellite data have been used to calculate change over the last 3 decades, but methods to quantify this over longer timescales have eluded researchers. However, there is an archive of aerial photography dating back to the 1940s, this has been largely ignored due to the range of technical problems associated with deriving quantitative data from historic imagery and the lack of ground control data. This talk will introduce some of the early expeditions that collected aerial photography of the Antarctic Peninsula and then demonstrate how advances in image processing and capture of modern aerial photography has allowed this archive to be ’unlocked’. The spatial and temporal changes that have occurred on the glaciers over the period of record will then be explored.



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