Ice Canyon
During a research flight over West Antarctica in the fall of 2011, scientists and flight crew with NASA's Operation IceBridge looked out their windows and saw what appeared to be a giant crack across the ice. Satellite imagery confirmed the view: Pine Island Glacier's ice shelf was breaking apart. The team later flew directly over the emerging rift, collecting a series of downward-looking, high-definition photographs snapped every two seconds. Pieced together, these images created a 3D model of the crack, saturated with detail. A spacious crevasse twists and turns while collapsed ice boulders rest at the foot of sheer frozen walls. Watch the visualization below to take a soaring journey over and into this model view of the 150-foot-deep ice canyon.
Take to the air above and through a widening rift across an Antarctic ice shelf.
This "airborne" tour was created from only a small portion of the images collected during a flight over the crack on Oct. 26, 2011.
The crack measured about 240 feet wide and 150 feet deep in most places, and extended more than 18 miles.
This close-up of the crack is an example of the many images that were stitched together to create the 3D model.
The on-board display of the Digital Mapping System shows what the flight crew saw as they flew over the crack in the ice shelf.
A low-altitude flyover provided up-close views of the crack running across the ice shelf.
The crack, seen by NASA's Terra satellite in Nov. 2011. As of Apr. 2012, the crack has yet to reach across the ice shelf and release an iceberg.
For More Information
See NASA.gov
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Photographs courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Jefferson Beck
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Writer
- Patrick Lynch (Wyle Information Systems)
Release date
This page was originally published on Thursday, April 12, 2012.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:53 PM EDT.