Surface Damage Dataset for Antarctic Ice Shelves 1999–2024

Abstract

Antarctic ice shelves have undergone substantial retreat and thinning in recent decades, reducing their buttressing capacity and potentially increasing the risk of sea-level rise. Surface damage, including crevasses, rifts and heavily fractured areas, serves as an important indicator of ice shelf structural integrity, yet its long-term evolution across Antarctic ice shelves remains insufficiently documented. This dataset provides multi-decadal surface damage maps derived from Landsat optical imagery from 1999 to 2024. It covers nine representative Antarctic ice shelves: Amery, Brunt, Crosson, Dotson, Holmes, Pine Island, Scar Inlet, Thwaites and Totten. These ice shelves encompass a range of glaciological settings and change behaviours, from relatively stable systems to rapidly changing ice shelves. The surface damage maps were generated using a deep-learning segmentation method applied to Landsat 7/8/9 optical imagery. The dataset contains 170 surface damage maps, each representing a single ice shelf for a specific year. All maps are provided at 30 m spatial resolution in GeoTIFF format using the Antarctic Polar Stereographic projection (EPSG:3031). To extend the usable record, Landsat 7 SLC-off imagery was restored using a diffusion-model-based framework prior to surface damage mapping. Detailed information on data structure, file naming conventions and usage is provided in the README.md file included with the dataset.