<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="data-paper" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-414</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A multi-decadal dataset of surface damage on Antarctic ice shelves (1999&amp;ndash;2024)</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tang</surname>
<given-names>Leyue</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3006-7798</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bamber</surname>
<given-names>Jonathan L.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2280-2819</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Tian</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1577-4004</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Qiao</surname>
<given-names>Gang</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2010-6238</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Center for Spatial Information Science and Sustainable Development Applications, College of Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Bristol Glaciology Centre, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, Garching, 85748, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>29</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>34</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Leyue Tang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-414/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-414/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-414/essd-2026-414.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-414/essd-2026-414.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Many Antarctic ice shelves have undergone accelerated thinning and retreat in recent decades, weakening their buttressing effect on grounded ice and increasing the risk of further sea-level rise. Surface damage, including crevasses, rifts and heavily fractured areas, is an important indicator of ice shelf structural integrity, but there is limited understanding of its long-term evolution across Antarctic ice shelves. Here we present a new surface damage dataset for nine representative Antarctic ice shelves, derived from Landsat optical imagery covering the period 1999&amp;ndash;2024. These ice shelves include Amery, Brunt, Crosson, Dotson, Holmes, Larsen B, Pine Island, Thwaites and Totten, and encompass a range of change behaviours from relatively stable to rapidly changing systems. A deep-learning image segmentation model was trained on a manually annotated dataset from diverse Antarctic ice shelves to automatically map surface damage. To extend the usable record, Landsat 7 scan-line-corrector-off imagery was restored using a diffusion-model-based framework fine-tuned for Antarctic imagery. The final dataset contains 170 surface damage maps at 30 m resolution, each representing a single ice shelf for a specific year. Temporal coverage varies among ice shelves owing to differences in the availability of usable imagery. The model achieved a mean intersection over union of 0.845 on the test set and 0.822 on an independent validation ice shelf not included in model training. The dataset demonstrates good multi-temporal consistency, supporting its use for time-series analysis. Among the nine ice shelves, Pine Island, Thwaites and Larsen B show the most pronounced surface damage changes during the study period. Compared with existing studies, this dataset provides improved temporal continuity over multi-decadal timescales at substantially finer spatial resolution, offering new insights into the long-term evolution of Antarctic ice shelves and contributing to a better understanding of ice shelf instability. The dataset is publicly available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20425951&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20425951&lt;/a&gt; (Tang et al., 2026a).</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="34"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>42276249</award-id>
<award-id>42394131</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality</funding-source>
<award-id>23230712200</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs3">
<funding-source>Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities</funding-source>
<award-id>/</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs4">
<funding-source>Leverhulme Trust</funding-source>
<award-id>ECF-2024-157</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>