Global Team Releases Most Comprehensive GNSS Data Set of Antarctic Bedrock Motion

An international team of scientists, including The Ohio State University's Byrd Center Principal Investigators and School of Earth Sciences Professors Terry Wilson (POLENET Group) and Demián Gómez, along with Research Scientist Eric Kendrick, has produced the most comprehensive and consistent data set of bedrock movement across Antarctica to date.
The study, published in Earth System Science Data, reprocessed nearly three decades of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data from 286 stations, covering 1995 to 2021. This coordinated effort, known as the GIANT-REGAIN (Geodynamics In ANTarctica based on REprocessing GNSS dAta Initiative) project, aimed to unify previously scattered and inconsistently processed GNSS data collected by various research institutions and national Antarctic programs.
By standardizing data processing methods and correcting metadata across multiple networks, the research team successfully produced a high-resolution, long-term coordinate time series that captures both vertical and horizontal bedrock motion. The work allows for more precise investigations into a range of geodynamic phenomena, including tectonic activity and the Earth's response to historical and contemporary ice mass changes, called glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA).
The Ohio State research team contributed one of the four core analysis solutions, leveraging the GAMIT/GLOBK software to process regional data and help form a combined final product. The resulting data set significantly improves spatial coverage across regions with previously limited monitoring.
This unified coordinate time series is expected to strengthen future climate and geophysical research by reducing uncertainties in GIA modeling, which is critical for interpreting satellite-based measurements of ice mass loss and sea-level change. The data and accompanying metadata are publicly available through the PANGAEA repository and will serve as a baseline for future updates and expanded observation networks.
Other authors of the study included researchers from the Institut für Planetare Geodäsie at TUD Dresden University of Technology in Dresden, Germany: Eric Buchta, Mirko Scheinert, Christoph Knöfel (now with the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt am Main), and Peter Busch (currently with Vodafone Group Services GmbH in Düsseldorf). From the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences and the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, the team included Matt A. King. Achraf Koulali and Peter J. Clarke contributed from the School of Engineering's Geospatial Engineering Group at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.
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