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Newly Unveiled
Satellite Map of Antarctica Is a Unique Tool for Scientists, Educators and the
Public
Joint NSF, NASA,
USGS and British Antarctic Survey Project embodies the International Polar Year
spirit
November 27, 2007-Three
federal agencies and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) today unveiled a
uniquely detailed and scientifically accurate satellite mosaic map of Antarctica
that is expected to become a standard geographic reference and will give both
scientists and the general public an unmatched tool for studying the
southernmost continent.
Representatives of the National
Science Foundation (NSF), the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS), the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and BAS worked cooperatively to
produce the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA), a map that combines more
than 1,100 hand-selected Landsat satellite scenes digitally compiled to create a
single, seamless, cloud-free image.
The new map was introduced to the
media and public during an event at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.
At a moment in history when there
is unprecedented concern about the state of the polar ice caps in the face of
documented regional Arctic and Antarctic warming trends, the LIMA mosaic
provides a critical "snapshot in time" of of Antarctica's ice sheets,
which contain over 60 percent the world's fresh water, noted Scott Borg,
director of NSF's division of Antarctic sciences.
"But LIMA is also a
fundamental tool for scientists. It will be used in every discipline from
biology to geology to glaciology, both to answer scientific questions and plan
fieldwork in the vast unexplored tracts of Antarctica. For educators, students,
and the general public, LIMA will bring to life the Antarctic continent like
nothing before it," Borg said. "Imagine a middle-school Earth-science
student comparing landforms in the glaciated valleys of Antarctic to similar
features in the Rocky Mountains or even comparing a rock glacier in Antarctica
with some of the features scientists are studying in images from Mars."
"This mosaic draws on 35
years of experience by the USGS's Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)
center, whose goals include the preservation of and access to the Nation's
remotely sensed land data assets through the National Satellite Land Remote
Sensing Data Archive," said Barbara Ryan, USGS associate director for
geography. LIMA was produced using EROS images from the Landsat 7 satellite
launched in 1999.
The Landsat Program began in
1972, with the launch of the first Landsat satellite. "Sensors aboard
Landsat satellites have captured millions of digital images of the Earth's land
masses and coastal regions used by researchers worldwide to study global change,
natural disasters, and other aspects of the Earth's terrestrial
environment," Ryan said.
Robert Bindschadler, chief
scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard,
noted that the new mosaic is the most detailed map of the continent in existence
and offers the most geographically accurate, true-color views of the continent
possible. "This innovation, compared to what we had available most
recently, is like watching the most spectacular high-definition TV in living
color versus watching the picture on a small black-and-white television,"he
said.
An NSF grant provided the nearly
$1 million U.S. contribution to the LIMA project. Tom Wagner, earth sciences
program director for the NSF-managed U.S. Antarctic Program, noted that this
project is the first major scientific product of the International Polar year (IPY).
"LIMA represents the true
spirit of the IPY in two ways," Wagner said. "Firstly, it's an
international collaboration between the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and
secondly, the map and raw data are freely available to the world community of
scientists, educators, and the general public."
IPY is a coordinated
international field campaign that began in March 2007. During IPY, hundreds of
scientists from more than 60 nations will deploy to the Arctic and Antarctic to
study a range of disciplines. IPY marks the beginning of a sustained effort to
understand large-scale environmental change in the Earth's polar regions. NSF is
the lead U.S. agency for IPY.
Wagner added that apart from the
international collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey, the project is a
major interagency collaborative, with both USGS and NASA playing unique and key
roles in bringing the map into existence, and that the LIMA project grew out of
a "grassroots" scientific consensus across the government that the
project had merit.
Two researchers, Jerry Mullins,
at USGS, and Bindschadler, at NASA, he added, were instrumental in LIMA's
development.
"Recognizing that change was
afoot in the mapping community, Jerry Mullins, with NSF's support, organized a
meeting of Antarctic researchers to determine their needs for information about
Antarctica. And it quickly became apparent that LandSat imagery had great
potential but needed to be shaped into a new map for its potential to be
realized," Wagner said.
Wagner said that "Bob
Bindschadler had the foresight many years ago to convince NASA that the Landsat
satellite should collect data over Antarctica. His group also picked all of the
images that make up the mosaic. It wasn't easy work; many thousands of scenes
were considered and rejected. New techniques to interpret the data were also
developed by Bob's group just for this project."
-NSF-
Media Contacts
Peter West, NSF (703) 292-7761 pwest@nsf.gov
Denver Makle, USGS (703) 648-4732 dmakle@usgs.gov
Tabatha Thompson, NASA Headquarters (202) 358-3895 tabatha.thompson-1@nasa.gov
Program Contacts
Thomas P. Wagner, NSF (703) 292-4746 twagner@nsf.gov
Related Websites
http://lima.usgs.gov/: The
U.S. Geological Survey's LIMA Web site
http://lima.nasa.gov/: NASA
's LIMA Web site
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/: The
British Antarctic Survey's Web site
U.S. Government Web Portal for the International Polar Year: http://www.ipy.gov
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