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Dr Rebecca Dell, with Prof. Ian Willis and Prof. Neil Arnold, from the Scott Polar Research Institute, have used machine learning to analyse hundreds of satellite images to map lakes and slush across 57 of Antarctica's largest ice shelves between 2013 and 2021. Their work is published in Nature Geoscience. Whereas previous work had only mapped lakes, they show that including slush doubles the ice shelf area covered by melt water in mid-summer. As the weight of water on ice shelves has the potential to fracture them, causing their collapse, the work has important implications for future sea level rise, as ice shelf loss causes Antarctica's massive glaciers to flow more rapidly from land to sea. The work is done together with Dr Alison Banwell, U. Colorado, Boulder, and PhD student Sophie de Roda Husman, Delft University of Technology.