Antarctica

Is Antarctica greening?

In a recent study, Roland and Bartlett et al. (2024) showed that the Antarctic Peninsula is « greening », i.e. the area covered by vegetation is growing. This article published in Nature Geoscience was featured in many media outlets. The authors drew this conclusion from the analysis of 35 years of Landsat images. More specifically, they computed […]

Iceberg B-22A on the go

B-22A is the largest iceberg in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica (50 times Manhattan land area). It broke off from Thwaites Glacier’s tongue and remained grounded for 20 years.. But now it’s on the go, as shown by this animation I made from Sentinel-1 SAR images (about 1 per month since June 2015, total 75 frames): […]

Le glacier de l’Astrolabe s’apprête à vêler un bel iceberg

Sur une image Pléiades acquise le 15 janvier, Etienne a remarqué une fracture qui traverse une bonne partie de la langue du glacier de l’Astrolabe auprès de la base Dumont-d’Urville en Antarctique. On peut reconstituer l’ouverture de cette crevasse à partir d’une série d’images Sentinel-1 (une année complète de janvier 2020 à janvier 2021) D’après […]

Flying over Antarctica in 1968

The Polar Geospatial Center has put online a nice web mapping interface to browse and download trimetrogon aerial (TMA) photography of Antarctica [1]. The trimetrogon was a system of three cameras which captured three photographs at the same time, one vertical and two high oblique. I made the animation [2] below with the left photos […]

Watching ice shelves break up with Sentinel-1

The animation below shows the evolution of Thwaites glacier eastern ice shelf in West Antarctica, from July 2016 to May 2017. I made it with 45 quicklooks of Sentinel-1 radar images processed by the Alaska Satellite Facility and available via the vertex data portal. All images were acquired in interferometric wide swath mode (polarization HH, […]

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 […]

Sentinel-2A now watching Antarctica

Sentinel-2A was launched on 23-July-2015 but the routine operations started in July 2016 after the ramp-up phase [1]. Now with the onset of the austral summer, the first Sentinel-2A images of Antarctica are getting available (except for Dome C, which is a calibration site).  

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