Glaciology in the age of AI

Glaciers and ice sheets are retreating rapidly due to climate change, and the consequences are being felt worldwide. Changing sea level, icebergs in newly opening Arctic trade routes, glacier driven flooding, landslides and avalanches are posing new risks to both environment and communities at large. Monitoring these rapid changes is essential.

Advanced satellite systems now provide complete global coverage every six days, generating vast datasets of these complex systems that would be impossible to analyse without artificial intelligence.

At the University of Liverpool, we are getting glaciology ready for the AI revolution. Our researchers are generating the datasets needed train local and global scale models. In doing so, we are leading on the fundamental, but often unsung work that will be required for identifying these risks before they happen.

Powered by novel cloud-computing approaches that accelerate task efficiency from hours to seconds, our work has included meticulous manual analysis of satellite imagery from the entire Greenland Ice Sheet over the last 40 years. By applying machine learning to these data, we have disentangled the complex drivers of change at iceberg-producing glaciers in Greenland which account for half of its contribution to global sea level change.

Glaciers are also retreating in mountainous regions across the world, with our work also including the first global scale analysis quantifying how many glaciers have already been lost. Through automating analysis of more than 10 million satellite images, we have been able to show the impacts that climate change has already had on the global cryosphere and provide invaluable training data for AI models that will enable continuous monitoring of glaciers globally.

Our work is laying the foundation for transformative discoveries in our understanding of glaciers globally and how they will continue to impact people who live near and far from them. By uniting AI with decades of satellite surveillance, we are enabling new discoveries in how glaciers respond to climate change and how these shifts will affect societies. From Arctic shipping to water supplies in mountain regions, and the future of coastal cities worldwide.