AI-controlled disaster. Scientists make breakthrough in tracking melting icebergs

November 13, 22:58 Share:

AI was taught to determine the size of icebergs (Photo: ESA)

Scientists have learned to measure the size of icebergs using satellite photos and artificial intelligence. This sped up the process needed to monitor iceberg melting by 10,000 times.

In satellite images, icebergs, sea ice and clouds appear as bright objects against the dark ocean. This makes it much more difficult to manually monitor icebergs as they cannot be distinguished from sea ice or even coastlines, and makes such comparative analyzes less accurate.

“We sometimes had difficulty separating the icebergs from the sea ice around them, which is coarser and older and therefore appears brighter in satellite images. The same goes for the wind-swept ocean.. In addition, smaller iceberg fragments that are often found nearby… are easily mistakenly grouped together with the main iceberg,” explains researcher Anne Braakmann-Folgmann from the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), researchers from the University of Leeds were able to solve this problem.. They presented a neural network that not only determines the size of Antarctic icebergs with 99% accuracy by analyzing photographs, but also does it in 0.01 seconds. This is 10 thousand times faster than a human can handle this task, Space notes.

The new algorithm has already been tested on seven icebergs ranging in size from 54 square kilometers to 1052 square kilometers ( this is comparable in size to the city of Bern in Switzerland and Hong Kong). A diverse dataset was collected for the analysis, which included between 15 and 46 images for each iceberg, spanning different seasons from 2014 to 2020.

https://twitter.com/ESA_EO/status/1722525482434867231

The agency notes that good monitoring is essential to understanding how icebergs dissolve and release fresh water into the ocean.

“Giant icebergs are important components of the Antarctic environment. They influence ocean physics, chemistry, biology and, of course, maritime operations. Therefore, it is critical to locate icebergs and monitor their extent to quantify how much meltwater they release into the ocean,” says Braakmann-Folgmann.

Previously, NV Techno wrote that scientists consider a possible scenario in which potential pathogens stored in permafrost for tens of thousands of years could awaken due to melting glaciers. Humanity has no natural immunity, effective vaccines or treatments against these ancient viruses and bacteria.

Read also: Victim of warming. The world's largest iceberg A68 has melted. An iceberg the size of London has broken off from an Antarctic glacier. Just obscenities. Journalists noticed an unusually shaped iceberg near a Canadian city with an unusual name.

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