How did the ice dynamics change at the Antarctic Peninsula during the last decades and what are the drivers?

Thorsten completed his Physics studies at Julius Maximilians University Würzburg, Germany in 2011, with a focus on geophysics and a thesis on “Upgrade and testing of an experimental setup to study explosive magma-water interactions”. During the period 2012-2016 he was a research associate and doctoral candidate at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, working on multi-temporal remote sensing of glaciers, automatization of processing routines, analyses of glacier velocity, elevation and area changes and field measurements at the Antarctic Peninsula. He completed a doctoral thesis on “Changes in ice dynamics and glacier mass balances on the northern Antarctic Peninsula derived from remote sensing data”. Since November 2016 he is a research assistant at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he worked first on project GEKKO “Glacier changes in the Tropical Andes” (multi-sensor remote sensing, spatial analyses and statistics, regional glacier area and mass balance changes) and, since 2019, on the TAPE (“Tapping the potential of Earth Observation”) project. He’s focusing on implementation of inpainting techniques for remote sensing and glacier front detection and ice velocity reconstruction using neural networks.

Research objectives

The main project objective is to increase the knowledge of the glaciological processes and changes on the Antarctic Peninsula (<70°S) using earth observation, in-situ and modelling data sets.

The following specific objectives are targeted:

• area wide assessment of geodetic mass balances by means of repeated bistatic InSAR satellite acquisitions
• enhanced analysis of temporal changes of glacier flow and quantification of ice discharge throughout the study region
• improved and precise estimation of ice losses on regional and glacier scales
• analysis on spatiotemporal variations in the mass balance estimates and ice dynamics
• assessment of causes for revealed change patterns by including oceanic and atmospheric modeling and in-situ data sets.

Read more on the research project sheet.