A community vision for next-generation bed mapping in Antarctica

Antarctic bed mapping underpins our understanding of ice-sheet stability, grounding-line retreat and future sea-level rise. Detailed geomorphological and geophysical knowledge, integrated with geological characteristics, reveals long-term processes such as erosion, sediment transport to the ocean and contributions to global geochemical cycles. Despite major advances in radar surveys, large regions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet remain poorly constrained. A side meeting held on 8 May 2025, immediately after the Royal Society's Theo Murphy Meeting on Next Generation Ice-sheet Bed Measurements, gathered international experts to identify priorities for advancing coordinated surveys, data integration and open infrastructure. These discussions, timely as the community prepares for the fifth International Polar Year (IPY5; 2032-2033), emphasized harmonized survey design, closer integration with modelling and remote-sensing communities, improved data standards and archiving, and implementation of emerging technologies such as swath radar, drone and artificial intelligence-assisted data interpretations. Together, they highlight both the urgency and the opportunity to build an internationally coherent framework for next-generation Antarctic bed measurements. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Next generation ice-sheet bed measurements'.