As the planet warms, Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting and contributing to sea-level rise around the globe.
As the planet warms, Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting and contributing to sea-level rise around the globe. Antarctica holds enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by 190 feet, so precisely predicting how it will move and melt now and in the future is vital for protecting coastal areas. But most climate models struggle to accurately simulate the movement of Antarctic ice due to sparse data and the complexity of interactions between the ocean, atmosphere, and frozen surface.
In a paper published March 13 in Science, researchers at Stanford University used machine learning to analyze high-resolution remote-sensing data of ice movements in Antarctica for the first time. Their work reveals some of the fundamental physics governing the large-scale movements of the Antarctic ice sheet and could help improve predictions about how the continent will change in the future.
“A vast amount of observational data has become widely available in the satellite age,” said Ching-Yao Lai, an assistant professor of geophysics in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and senior author on the paper. “We combined that extensive observational dataset with physics-informed deep learning to gain new insights about the behavior of ice in its natural environment.”
Read More: Stanford University
This map, showing glaciers and tributaries in patterned flows, was created with the same data that Stanford researchers used to train an AI model that revealed some of the fundamental physics governing the large-scale movements of the Antarctic ice sheet.(Photo Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
