A Framework for Fracture Extraction Under Glaciological Property‐Based Constraints: Scientific Application on the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf of Antarctica

Abstract

Abstract Fractures are an important indicator of ice shelf instability and predecessors of calving events. It is of great importance to identify fractures and understand the formation and propagation processes of fractures. However, automated methods of fracture identification also erroneously extract non‐fracture features, which are mixed with the automatically extracted fractures, negatively impacting the accuracy of the results. In this study, a framework for fracture extraction with glaciological property‐based constraints was proposed to extract fractures and filter out non‐fracture features. The extraction module consists of image preprocessing and linear feature extraction. The constraints were based on glaciological property analysis, including constraints based on physical properties of fractures and structural properties of ice shelves. The framework was applied to Mosaic of Antarctica and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager images to extract fractures on the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf. The results suggest that most of the non‐fracture features were successfully filtered out, accounting for about half of all linear features. Upon comparison, it was found that the proposed method detected ∼97% of the rifts and ∼42% of the crevasses detected by manual extraction. The spatial pattern and formation mechanisms of the fractures were analyzed based on strain maps. The formation of crevasses is closely related to shear margin and longitudinal tension, while the large rifts near the ice shelf front are likely to be related to the strikes of lateral ice flow tributaries. The constraint strategy can be further improved by utilizing more glaciological properties to obtain more‐accurate fracture extraction.

Keywords

• fractures
• edge detection
• glaciological property‐based constraints
• Antarctica
• ice shelf