Pine Island Glacier Calving (WMS)

  • Released Wednesday, March 9, 2005
View full credits

The Pine Island Glacier is the largest discharger of ice in Antarctica and the continent's fastest moving glacier. Even so, when a large crack formed across the glacier in mid 2000, it was surprising how fast the crack expanded, 15 meters per day, and how soon the resulting iceberg broke off, mid-November, 2001. This iceberg, called B-21, is 42 kilometers by 17 kilometers and contains seven years of glacier outflow released to the sea in a single event. This series of images from the MISR instrument on the Terra satellite not only shows the crack expanding and the iceberg breaking off, but the seaward moving glacial flow in the parts of the Pine Island Glacier upstream of the crack.

Breakoff of iceberg B-21 from the Pine Island glacier shown in imagery acquired by MISR

This product is available through our Web Map Service.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Wednesday, March 9, 2005.
This page was last updated on Sunday, February 2, 2025 at 10:00 PM EST.

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

Series

This page can be found in the following series:

Datasets used

  • [Terra: MISR]

    ID: 115
    Sensor: MISR Dates used: 2000/09/16, 2000/11/28, 2000/12/12, 2001/01/01, 2001/01/22, 2001/02/25, 2002/090/08, /2001/10/10, 2001/10/26, 2001/11/04, 2001/11/09, 2001/11/11, 2001/11/12
    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.