BEDMAP2
Welcome to BEDMAP2
The BEDMAP2 project, part of the International Polar Year (IPY), aims to assemble all new data on ice thickness and bed topography for Antarctica. The aim is to provide new ice surface and bed elevation maps for the continent and surrounding seas.
The original BEDMAP project, completed in 2000, brought together a strong international consortium of Antarctic scientists who pooled data from several decades of polar expeditions. It produced the first comprehensive maps of the Antarctic landscape that lay hidden under the ice sheets for hundreds of thousands of years. From these, the volume of Antarctic ice was revealed and, since then, many other research projects have used the maps to model ice sheet flow and for studies of geology, tectonics, crustal seismics, magnetics and ice core interpretation.
What's new?
Since the first BEDMAP, around 265,000 km of new over-ice survey lines (seismic and radar) have been acquired including major new surveys of the Amundsen Sea embayment, Vostok area, Ellsworth Land, Dronning Maud Land and Terre Adelie, as well as numerous other measurements on glaciers, ice streams and shelves. Surface elevation mapping has greatly benefited from the accumulation of a very large dataset of satellite altimetry. In addition, remapping of Southern Ocean bathymetry is already under way within the SCAR-SOGIS project that will incorporate many new ship track measurements and we plan to share data with this project (which is within SCAR-ACE) to produce a seamless map of the bed out to the continental shelf-break and beyond.
We will use these data to make new and continuous, regular grids of bed topography and ice thickness. We will make these grids, along with a new surface elevation grid, freely available to all users. They will help the polar science community to understand Antarctica's past and present, and to predict it's future.
The BEDMAP2 consortium
BEDMAP clearly demonstrated the benefits to be gained from international collaboration in the spirit of the IPY. The BEDMAP2 consortium is now forming and will play the same vital role in making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.If you hold new Antarctic ice thickness measurements (not included in the original BEDMAP), please join our consortium. We will only distribute the gridded products, not original data, and we will ensure that all contributors are credited explicitly in the publication of BEDMAP2. Contact Dr Hamish Pritchard, British Antarctic Survey, for more information.
