Antarctic Bedmap data: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) sharing of 60 years of ice bed, surface, and thickness data

One of the key components of this research has been the mapping of Antarctic bed topography and ice thickness parameters that are crucial for modelling ice flow and hence for predicting future ice loss andthe ensuing sea level rise. Supported by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the Bedmap3 Action Group aims not only to produce newgridded maps of ice thickness and bed topography for the internationalscientific community, but also to standardize and make available all thegeophysical survey data points used in producing the Bedmap griddedproducts. Here, we document the survey data used in the latest iteration,Bedmap3, incorporating and adding to all of the datasets previously used forBedmap1 and Bedmap2, including ice bed, surface and thickness point data from all Antarctic geophysical campaigns since the 1950s. More specifically,we describe the processes used to standardize and make these and futuresurveys and gridded datasets accessible under the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles. With the goals of making the gridding process reproducible and allowing scientists to re-use the data freely for their own analysis, we introduce the new SCAR Bedmap Data Portal(https://bedmap.scar.org, last access: 1 March 2023) created to provideunprecedented open access to these important datasets through a web-map interface. We believe that this data release will be a valuable asset to Antarctic research and will greatly extend the life cycle of the data heldwithin it. Data are available from the UK Polar Data Centre: https://data.bas.ac.uk (last access: 5 May 2023​​​​​​​). See the Data availability section for the complete list of datasets.
info:eu-repo/semantics/published