Viedma glacier terminus since 1985

In English Landsat Sentinel-2 snow-ice

Simon Gascoin, 27 décembre 2021

Viedma Glacier is an iconic glacier of the Southern Patagonia icefield. Landsat 5, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images series show that its terminus has retreated by 3 km since 1985.

Viedma glacier terminus evolution

Looking closer one can notice a new proglacial lake forming in a recently deglaciated area.

Since I won 80 sq km of Airbus Pléiades data, I ordered 3 sq km of a Pléiades image captured on Feb 05, 2021 to estimate that the area of the neo-lake should be between 0.3 and 0.4 sq km.

Pléiades 2021-02-05 © Airbus DS

But the images also show the disappearance of a formerly ice-dammed lake in the south..

Image

This place is very interesting to study as many periglacial processes are exacerbated by climate change. Yet, Viedma glacier front will never look the same without its curved stretch of ice…

You can look at the images here. And make your own gif from 35 years of satellite imagery in the Sentinel Hub EO Browser.

Plus d'actualités

The missing link to valorize CESBIO’s applicative research works

=>  My colleagues at CESBIO are extremely creative! Over the past ten years, they have developed a wide range of new products and methods for extracting information from Copernicus data. They don’t just develop and validate the method on a few sites; they continue their work until they have produced data for the whole of […]

Le chaînon manquant dans la valorisation des travaux de recherche en télédétection

=> Mes collègues du CESBIO sont très créatifs ! Ils ont mis au point, au cours des dix dernières années, un grand nombre de nouveaux produits et de méthodes d’extraction de l’information à partir des données Copernicus (Sentinel-1 et 2). Et bien souvent, ils ne s’arrêtent pas à la mise au point de la méthode […]

Sentinel-2 overtakes Landsat in scientific litterature

OpenAlex is a new, yet already very useful, open database for exploring scientific literature. For an upcoming blog post on the CNES Datacampus website, I analysed the proportion of papers that used only one of the Sentinel-2 or Landsat missions, as well as those that used both, in 2025. What struck me was that Sentinel-2 […]

Rechercher