In preparation for a research project focused on the risk of the sea level rise (SLR), and on the basis of previousstudies, we started to investigate the ice loss by some marine-terminating ice tongues in Antarctica in the last10 years. The rst test site selected for this study was the Erebus Ice Tongue (EIT) which stretches from RossIsland into the Ross Sea. The analysis was carried out using Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK) images from the catalogue ofthe Italian Space Agency (ASI) and from a recent acquisition. The scene under analysis includes various elementssuch as sea-ice, open-sea and sections of the Ross Island coast. Over the years, the area of the EIT underwentvarious changes. Thus, to avoid misinterpretations caused by the temporal variations of the scene elements, itwas decided to restrict the analysis to the tongue itself. The rst step of the analysis dened a methodologyfor automatically detecting the EIT in a delimited window. This was accomplished using a Template Matchingtechnique which samples the input image with a manual training pattern of the EIT structure. The result showsthe matches of the EIT patch. In the second step, a relaxation method for pixel labelling was developed in orderto compare the area of the ice tongue as it was 10 years ago and today. In the case of the Erebus Ice Tongue,the analysis shows a modest decline of the area in the last 10 years, hence a modest ice loss.
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