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FACEBOOK0 Astrolabe Glacier and Unbalanced Ice
Located in the Terre Adélie-George V Land section of East Antarctica, Astrolabe Glacier streams out from the interior of Antarctica to dump ice into the sea. This outlet glacier is estimated to be 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide, and the drainage basin that feeds it stretches as much as 200 kilometers (120 miles) inland.
The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Astrolabe on November 28, 2010, in late austral spring. Icebergs were breaking off from the glacier tongue—which extends from the coast like a shelf over the open water of the Southern Ocean—and running into sea ice. The calving front is roughly 7 kilometers (4 miles) wide, and scientists estimate that it loses half a cubic kilometer of ice per year.
The ice calving shown in this image is not necessarily unusual for the region or the time of year. But what is unusual is how much more calving all the glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland have been doing in the past two decades.
According to a new NASA-funded satellite study, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace and are overtaking ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise. The graph above shows the gain and loss of ice mass from the world's two largest ice sheets. Though there are gains within individual years, the overall trend from 1992 to 2010 has been toward losses.
Each year over the course of the 18-year study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 billion tons more than they did the year before. The Greenland ice sheet lost mass faster at an average of 21.9 billion tons more per year. In Antarctica, the year-over-year speedup in lost ice mass averaged 14.5 billion tons.
The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Astrolabe on November 28, 2010, in late austral spring. Icebergs were breaking off from the glacier tongue—which extends from the coast like a shelf over the open water of the Southern Ocean—and running into sea ice. The calving front is roughly 7 kilometers (4 miles) wide, and scientists estimate that it loses half a cubic kilometer of ice per year.
The ice calving shown in this image is not necessarily unusual for the region or the time of year. But what is unusual is how much more calving all the glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland have been doing in the past two decades.
According to a new NASA-funded satellite study, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace and are overtaking ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise. The graph above shows the gain and loss of ice mass from the world's two largest ice sheets. Though there are gains within individual years, the overall trend from 1992 to 2010 has been toward losses.
Each year over the course of the 18-year study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 billion tons more than they did the year before. The Greenland ice sheet lost mass faster at an average of 21.9 billion tons more per year. In Antarctica, the year-over-year speedup in lost ice mass averaged 14.5 billion tons.
