Ilaria Santin

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering

Global warming is leading to ever faster glacier mass loss in every mountain range in the world. At high elevations and high latitudes – where ice temperatures are often still below the melting point – warming is also penetrating into glaciers and leading to measurably warmer ice. This warming can have a strong impact on glacier dynamics and glacie...

We reprocessed Chang'E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar data collected until 27th March 2023 with a total length of about 1440 m adding >400 m to the longest profile published so far. For data interpretation, we exploited a new Deep Learning-based algorithm to automatically extract reflectors from a processed radar dataset. The results are in terms of hor...

Chinese lunar landing mission Chang'E-4 reached the far side of the Moon in January 2019 and has been providing unprecedented Lunar Penetrating Radar data able to explore the lunar subsurface down to more than 40 m (with its more resolutive high frequency band). Data are periodically released to the scientific community in raw PDS4 format. Here we...

Scattering is often detected when Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) surveys are performed on glaciers at different latitudes and in various environments. This event is often seen as an undesirable feature on data, but it can be exploited to quantify the debris content in mountain glaciers through a dedicated scattering inversion approach. At first, we...

GPR systems with a single central frequency suffer limitations due to the unavoidable trade-off between resolution and penetration depth that multi frequency equipments can overcome. We propose a new semi-supervised multi-frequency merging algorithm based on Deep Learning and specifically on Bi-Directional Long-Short Term Memory to automatically me...

We reprocessed and interpreted Chang’E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) data collected until 14th February 2023, exploiting a new Deep Learning-based algorithm to automatically extract reflectors from a processed radar dataset. The results are in terms of horizon probability and have been interpreted by integrating signal attribute analysis with orb...

In this study we integrated different techniques, spanning from Ground Penetrating Radar to geomorphological and photogrammetric data, to characterize the glacial and proglacial environments of the Sforzellina Glacier (Central Alps, Italy). Direct data highlighted the presence of debris-covered ice and even of dead ice patches in front of the actua...

We performed GPR modelling and inversion in order to estimate the debris content within the ice of mountain glaciers. Having established that the high scattered zone identified within the ice was due to a mix of ice and debris, we focused on the evaluation of the parameters that influence the scattering energy, considering the dimensions and the am...

The results of a combined geophysical and geomorphological investigation of thermal‐contraction‐crack polygons near Gondwana station (Germany) in northern Victoria Land (Antarctica) are reported. An area of about 20,000 m2 characterized by random orthogonal polygons was investigated using integrated ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity...

In GPR profiles, ice is usually imaged as a mostly electromagnetic transparent facies. However, diffraction events, as well as internal layering, can be also observed. In some cases, the bedrock below glaciers is masked by dense diffractions usually interpreted as the effect of liquid water pockets inside the so-called warm ice. However, the actual...

We exploit the attribute analysis of GPR data to analyze the different EM responses of the ice of two alpine glaciers. We focus on frequency-related attributes to identify zones with higher attenuation of EM signal, which could be further related to higher water content and higher electrical conductivity. We succeeded in associating the scattering...

A 10-year-long evolution of ice thickness and volume of the Marmolada glacier is presented. Quantitative measurements have been performed by using two different Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) datasets. A ground-based survey using two different ground-coupled systems equipped with 100 MHz and 35 MHz antennas was performed in 2004. In 2015 the datase...