Decadal Northern Hemisphere marine-terminating glacier positions, 2000-2020

We manually digitized the 1704 marine-terminating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere (including Greenland Ice Sheet). These were done mostly from Landsat imagery, but some ASTER and synthetic aperture radar imagery as well. The data are from ~2000, ~2010, and ~2020 and show the glacier area that was gained or lost that is now or was ocean. Overall, 78.1% of glaciers retreated, 2.5% advanced, and the remaining 19.4% did not change outside of uncertainty limits. For further details, please see the publication. Feel free to contact us with any questions. Link to publication: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL096501

The files are organized by decade (early, late, total), area gained/lost, and glacier type (mountain/ice sheet). The early decade is 2000-2020, the late decade is 2010-2020, and total is 2000-2020. The areas gained (advance) and lost (retreat) are provided for each glacier, although not every glacier has area that was gained or lost (all glaciers have at least some area gained or lost). Finally, the files are split for mountain glaciers (everything outside the Greenland Ice Sheet, including periphery glaciers) and ice sheet outlets (ice_sheet). Files are provided in the geojson format, which is easily read in QGIS and other open source software including text editors. The projection for all data is polar stereographic (EPSG 3995). All files contain attributes such as the name/id of the glacier (RGI6), the area, and the perimeter (used in error analysis). In order to obtain the date of the observation used the .csv file.

The csv file contains all the specifics for each glacier including the glacier name/id, the satellite image id and date for the early (~2000), middle (~2010), and late (~2020) observation, the area changes (2000-2010, 2010-2020, and 2000-2020) with associated uncertainties, latitude, and longitude.