South Georgia is a glaciated island in the South Atlantic, which provides a primary nesting site for the albatrosses and petrels of the Southern Ocean. 60% of the island is covered by glaciers and ice fields, and the majority of the coastal glaciers are observed to be retreating. A small number of these glaciers are advancing, and others are retreating at anomalously fast rates. As the status o...

This paper is an attempt a t a mathematical synopsis of the theory of wave motions on glaciers. These comprise surface waves (analogous to water waves) and seasonal waves (more like compression waves). Surface waves have been often treated and are well understood, but seasonal waves, while observed, do not seem to have attracted any theoretical explanation. Additionally, the spectacular phenome...

Some glaciers in Greenland are currently showing dramatic changes: A fast retreat of the glacier front, thinning and acceleration of glacier movement. As a prominent example, Jacobshavn Isbræ glacier has accelerated from 20 meters per day to 40 meters per day within a few years. These effects can very well be observed by photogrammetric and remote sensing techniques. In the paper, we report on ...

Glaciers on Kilimanjaro’s highest peak, Kibo, are currently regarded as a persistent feature of the Holocene. Here we synthesize all available measurements, observations, and our understanding of current processes on Kibo – gained from intensive research over the past decade – to formulate an alternative hypothesis about the age of these ice fields. This suggests a shorter, discontinuous histor...

Enhanced submarine ice-shelf melting strongly controls ice loss in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE) of West Antarctica, but its magnitude is not well known in the critical grounding zones of the ASE's major glaciers. Here we directly quantify bottom ice losses along tens of kilometres with airborne radar sounding of the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves, which buttress the rapidly changing Smith, ...

[1] Glaciers which drain the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) into the Amundsen Sea are accelerating and thinning rapidly. These observations have been attributed to the regional oceanography whereby heat contained within Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) drives the basal melting of floating glaciers. On the basis of new data we calculate that 2.8 terra-Watts (10) of oceanic heat flow onto the contin...

This paper presents some applications of the Maximum Likelihood (ML) texture tracking on displacement estimation of some alpine and antarctic glaciers surfaces. This method is adapted to the statistical characteristic of the new High Resolution (HR) Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. The ML texture tracking method is firstly reminded and a statistical model of HR PolSAR data is explained. The main...