2010.07.01　　　Data uploaded at sector SR29-30，SR31-32 and SR33-34．

1. Introduction

The purpose of this website is to provide a database that identifies boundary areas between the Antarctic ice sheet and ice shelves (or between the land ice sheet and the sea) using interference SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) technology.According to recent research, the accumulation of snow falling on the grounded ice sheet is equivalent to 5.0 mm of sea water level¹⁾, while the mass loss is equivalent to about 2.3 mm of sea water level based on estimates of outflows from the main glaciers in the Antarctic region ²⁾. This slight difference between the accumulation and melting of ice sheets greatly affects the estimated annual fluctuation in sea level. In addition, the balance of mass at the periphery of Antarctica, not part of the main ice sheet, must be accounted for. More detailed estimates require information on the surface terrain (altitude), ice thickness, ice sheet flow and the boundary between the land ice sheet and the sea ice shelf (called the grounding line) surrounding Antarctica.
A digital geographical database called the “Antarctic Digital Database (ADD)” ³⁾, compiled from global Antarctic observations and edited by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), provides an estimate of grounding lines. However, the positions and shapes of these grounding lines have been reported as inaccurate, depending on areas ⁴⁾.
This website identifies grounding lines through an analytical technique called interference SAR (InSAR) and the results will be sequentially released as a database. We hope the results will contribute to research on variations of ice sheet mass in Antarctica and subsequently on fluctuations of the global environment.
This database is developed by joint research of Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan (RESTEC) and National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR).