AI and radar data reveal nearly 40,000 grounded icebergs along Antarctica’s coast

Researchers applied deep-learning techniques to Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar data to produce the first high-resolution, Antarctica-wide map of grounded icebergs. The resulting catalogue lists 39,619 stationary icebergs that together occupy roughly 13,430 sq km and are distributed along about 57 % of the continent’s coast, with 14 % of the shoreline containing 80 % of the features. Although 93 % of the icebergs are smaller than one square kilometre, they collectively form a “picket fence” effect that anchors landfast sea ice and can influence the stability of nearby ice shelves.

The study leveraged 2025 observations taken at a seasonal minimum of fast ice to improve detection of truly grounded objects, reducing the minimum identifiable size to about 1.6 ha. The authors note that small grounded icebergs may melt faster under warming oceans, potentially weakening their stabilising role. The dataset, published in Earth System Science Data, offers a reference point for tracking future changes in iceberg grounding, ice shelf dynamics and associated marine ecosystems.