Sentinel-1 backscatter darker/lighter either side of 'line' in image?

I have a Sentinel-1 (HH and HV) image that has been pre-processed with:

Thermal noise removal, radiometric calibration, speckle-filtering and then projected to a UTM Zone and converted to dB. It is around the margins of Antarctica.

Towards the bottom (south) of the image, there is a perceptible boundary, where the backscatter is a little brighter. This line seems to match up with one of the points where the border of the image is ‘jagged’ following projection. It is visible in HH and HV, but moreso HV, I attach an example, and I draw part of the line for clarity. Can anybody tell what is happening here? Thank you