Distribution of glacial and periglacial features within ice-free areas surrounding Maxwell Bay (South Shetland Islands) using polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data

Abstract

Active periglacial processes and landforms are common within the Northern Antarctic Peninsula region and are becoming the focus of interest for studying changes occurring to permafrost. The objective of this study was to identify and characterize glacial and periglacial surface features with fully polarimetric SAR C band RADARSAT-2 data in ice-free regions surrounding Maxwell Bay, South Shetland Islands. Extraction of polarimetric parameters, a selection of field based training sites and a supervised classification approach, were chosen to determine the spatial distribution of the different geomorphological surface features. These results show the identification of complex and relatively small scale geomorphological features such as periglacial landforms that are an important indicator of the presence of permafrost.