Pine Island Glacier rift

The rift of Pine Island Glacier’s floating tongue is a cause of concern among glaciologists because it suggests that this part of the ice shelf is not stable and may collapse in the future. As explained in this EOS article [1]

Rifts usually form at the sides of an ice shelf where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart. But this particular rift originated in the center of Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf and propagated out to the margins.This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf. The most likely explanation is that a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level, driven by a warming ocean, according to the researchers. »

Online survey: can we detect an expansion of the rift on the Sentinel-2 images only?

The results of the survey are given in the next post. [1] Lipuma, L. (2017), West Antarctic ice shelf breaking up from the inside out, Eos, 98, doi:10.1029/2017EO064743. Published on 04 January 2017

Plus d'actualités

BIOMASS, the third launched satellite mission designed at CESBIO !

After SMOS in 2009, and VENµS in 2017, the CESBIO Laboratory is very proud to see its third proposed mission, Biomass, reach orbit. As always, it has been a long journey from the idea, at the beginning of the century, to the selection in 2013 as the seventh Earth Explorer Mission by ESA, to the […]

Sentinel-2 reveals the surface deformation after the 2025 Myanmar earthquake

Sentinel-2 captured several clear-sky images of Myanmar before and after the 28 March 2025 earthquake. The animation below shows a 5-day apart sequence of images captured by Sentinel-2B and Sentinel-2C (10 m resolution) near the epicenter located close to Mandalay. The surface slip due to the earthquake follows the Sagaing Fault, a major fault in […]

Evolution de l’altitude de la ligne de neige au cours des 41 dernières années dans le bassin versant du Vénéon (Oisans)

Pour contribuer à caractériser les conditions hydrométéorologiques lors de la crue torrentielle qui a frappé la Bérarde en juin, j’ai analysé une nouvelle série de cartes d’enneigement qui couvre la période 1984-2024 [1]. Grâce à la profondeur temporelle de cette série, on constate que l’altitude de la ligne de neige dans le bassin versant du […]

Rechercher