Fluctuations of the Ice Flow Velocity of Shirase Glacier and its Surrounding Landfast Ice Displacement in East Antarctica Derived from alos-2/Palsar-2 Image Correlation

This study presents that temporal variations in ice flow velocities for Shirase Glacier and its surrounding landfast ice in Liitzow-Holm Bay, East Antarctica were estimated using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired by the Phased Array L-band SAR-2 (PALSAR-2) onboard Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) in 2015-2018. The images were analyzed using image correlation. The flow velocity at the 20 km downstream from the grounding line (GL) of Shirase Glacier is mean of 2.32 km a−1 in 2015–2018, which show that flow velocity is considered to be less related to the landfast ice stability. However, the flow velocity around 50 km downstream from the GL show changes related to landfast ice condition. The flow velocity is more increasable of 0.3 km a−1 under the unstable landfast ice condition than the stable landfast ice condition. Therefore, our results show the velocity of Shirase Glacier are associated with the condition of landfast ice stability or instability.