Landsat-1 mosaic of Antarctica from the 1970s

The Landsat-1 satellite provides sporadic coverage of coastal Antarctica between 1972 and 1975.  This dataset is a highly valuable scientific resource but has yet to be utilized to its full potential. The imagery are of reasonable quality and have a spatial resolution of 60 m, but are often difficult to process owing to their poor geolocation accuracy, where most images are displaced by >10 km. This requires a time-consuming manual correction which can be especially tricky over the featureless sections of the ice sheet (e.g. Ross Ice Shelf). Here we report on progress towards creating a geolocated mosaic over coastal Antarctica that preliminary analysis indicates will have near-complete coverage with only limited cloud cover. Potential glaciological uses for the mosaic include coastline change both in terms of fast flowing outlet glaciers and the slower flowing regions of the coastline, ice shelf damage, basal channel evolution and migration, changes in ice rises and also any changes in bedrock exposure. We highlight these potential uses with a few small-scale examples.