Subglacial Lakes, Drainage Pathways and Basins Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet Based on the Remote Sensing Big Data

Antarctic subglacial lakes which form an important component of the subglacial hydrological system have the potential to study the history of the ice sheet and the global climate change. In order to detect the potential subglacial lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. A dynamic threshold filtering algorithm has been applied on the CryoSat-2 satellite altimetry remote sensing data to derive the Antarctic potential subglacial lakes including the quantities, areas as well as drainage pathways. And we have compared the difference of the experimental results obtained by CryoSat-2 and Bedmap2 datasets. Our results show the superiority by using the CryoSat-2 data, which have filled the gap in the central area of the Antarctic. Besides CryoSat-2 Altimetry data can generate a rather accurate DEM of the Antarctic ice sheet by this algorithm. As a result, we have detected many more lakes covering about 3% of the total bed of Antarctic than were observed before. There are some direct hydrological connections between a large number of subglacial lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.