Officials at the European Space Agency announce that their intentions of using satellites to create the most detailed global picture of glaciers and ice caps ever have finally materialized.

The ambitious, three-year, €1million GlobGlacier project concluded successfully, representatives from the space agency say,

End-users got a chance to highlight its contributions during the final meeting experts handling the initiative had, in Zermatt, Switzerland.

The plan was set in motion back in 2007, when Earth observation satellites began being used to create an inventory of global glaciers.

This was done so that climate researchers could have a reference point in analyzing glaciers. It's well known that these ice blocks move and melt according to temperatures, so having a baseline measurement is useful in keeping track of how they evolve.

Creating such a baseline was the purpose of this satellite study. Experts looking at how global warming and climate change evolve in an area can now measure glacier displacement by cross-referencing current measurements with those made available by GlobGlacier.

“GlobGlacier has made an important contribution towards the completion of the global glacier inventory,” explains the director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), Michael Zemp.

“The close cooperation of the GlobGlacier consortium of remote-sensing specialists with the network of in-situ experts has been a key element for an improved understanding of glacier reaction to climatic changes,” he adds, quoted by ESA.

“Thanks to GlobGlacier it has been possible to compile a huge data set of urgently-needed glacier inventory data from key regions all over the world,” adds expert Frank Paul.

He is the project manager of GlobGlacier. The expert is based that the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, which is also the prime contractor of the initiative.

“In general, funding agencies do not provide any money for the processing of archived data with established methods, so this project has been really exceptional,” he adds.

“And, thanks to the opening of the US Geological Survey’s Landsat archive, it was possible to process a large amount of scenes and thus cover large glacierized regions with a consistent geolocation quality,” he concludes.