Thermal evidence for degradation of ice-cored moraines on Svalbard: Preliminary analysis of airborne MACS data

Kurzfassung

In the course of Earth analogue studies for Mars on Svalbard, several flight campaigns have been conducted with the MACS-Polar (Modular Aerial Camera System) in 2020 and 2024. MACS-Polar, a camera system developed by DLR in Berlin, consists of two high-resolution RGB and infrared (IR) cameras as well as a cooled bolometer to take thermal images. One of our target areas is an ice-cored lateral moraine of Kongsvegen glacier on the Brøgger peninsula in western Spitsbergen. The moraine is a highly dynamic environment, with intense sediment re-mobilisation due to slumping of a debris layer along the debris-ice contact. Thermal contrast, which involves both temperature and material specific emissivity differences, is fairly small in this natural polar environment with dominating glacial till material; solar radiation and exposition-induced effects are dominating the main thermal dynamics in the scene. While in the IR-RGB data the sparse vegetation and morphological features can be clearly depicted and mapped, the thermal channel highlights active melt zones on the ice-cored lateral moraine, which cannot be clearly differentiated form older inactive melt and slumping features by just using the high resolution RGB and IR data.

We exemplarily present data of degrading permafrost on Svalbard depicting active melt- and slump-zones and the connected hydrological system, and highlight the science potential and the challenges of thermal imaging systems in polar environments.