The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) Research Cruise to West Antarctica 2022
In winter 2022, I participated in a three-month multidisciplinary research cruise to West Antarctica as part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). The mission brought together scientists in oceanography, glaciology, geology, marine biology, chemistry, and remote sensing to study the Thwaites Glacier — one of Antarctica’s largest and fastest-retreating glaciers.
Although sea ice conditions prevented us from reaching Thwaites directly, we conducted data collection in and around the nearby Dotson Ice Shelf using a range of scientific tools, including autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), oceanographic instruments, sediment samplers, chemical sensors, and wildlife tracking tags.
I was part of the oceanography team from the University of Gothenburg. Our focus was to deploy RAN - a commercial Hugin AUV to investigate bathymetry and the underside of the ice shelf. My specific responsibilities included:
- Mission planning for AUV deployments: Processed satellite imagery (MODIS and Sentinel-1 using Python and GDAL to identify safe launch/recovery sites and target areas for survey.
- Bathymetric data processing: Used Python, Pandas and EIVA NaviSuite to process and visualize sonar data and support mapping efforts beneath the ice shelf.
This research experience gave me valuable exposure to polar fieldwork, large-scale data collection, and collaborative interdisciplinary science in one of the most remote regions on Earth.
I also documented the cruise experience through blogposts and photography, which can be found in the SMaRC blog. This included writing about the science and technology used during the cruise, as well as sharing personal reflections on the experience of working in such a remote and challenging environment.
Some publications from the cruise include:
- Swirls and Scoops: Ice Base Melt Revealed by Multibeam Imagery of An Antarctic Ice Shelf, Science Advances, 2024. [Paper]
- Benchmarking Classical and Learning-Based Multibeam Point Cloud Registration, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. [Website], [Github], [Paper], [Slides]