NSF COLDEX performed two airborne campaigns from South Pole Station over the Southern Flank of Dome A and 2022-23 and 2023-24, searching for a potential site of a continuous ice core that could sample the mid-Pleistocene transition. Ice thickness data extracted from the MARFA radar system has allow for a new understanding of this region.
Here we generate crustal scale maps of ice thickness, bed elevation, specularity content, subglacial RMS deviation, surface elevation and fractional basal ice thickness with 1 km sampling, and 10 km resolution. We include both masked and unmasked grids.
The projection is in the SCAR standard ESPG:3031 polar stereographic projection with true scale at 71˚S.
These geotiffs were generated using performed using GMT6.5 (Wessel et al., 2019) using the pygmt interface, by binning the raw data to 2.5 km cells, and using the nnbathy program to apply natural neighbor interpolation to 1 km sampling. A 10 km Gaussian filter - representing typical lines spacings - was applied and then a mask was applied for all locations where the nearest data point was further than 8 km.
Ice thickness, bed elevation and RMS deviation @ 400 m length scale (
roughness) data includes the following datasets:
Specularity content (Schroeder et al. 2014) is compiled from Young et al. 2025a and Young et al. 2025b.
Basal ice fractional thickness is complied from manual interpretation by Vega González, Yan and Singh.
Surface elevations is derived by combining the following datasets:
- UTIG 2022-23 and 2023-24 NSF COLDEX laser altimetry data
- BAS 2015-16 Polargap laser altimetry data (used for the surface in the bed elevation pick data)
- SOAR 1998-99 Pensacola-Pole Transect laser altimetry data
- ICECAP 2016-17 SPICECAP laser altimetry data
- NASA 2019-2024 ICESat-2/ATLAS gridded surface elevation data (north of 88˚S)
Code to generated these grids can be found at at github.com
