Global Glacier Locations designed for Science On a Sphere (SOS) and WMS

  • Released Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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This animation shows the locations of glaciers worldwide as semi-transparent markers that shrink over a time. Location data for the glaciers was collected from a wide variety of databases including the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) Glacier Database, the World Glacier Inventory, the West Greenland Glacier Inventory, the Antarctic Names Database, the Atlas of Canada and the Antarctic Digital database. In total, over 174,000 glaciers were identified. This set of glaciers was thinned spatially to retain only glaciers that were at least ¼ degree away from other glacier locations in order to remove points that appeared coincident given the size of the location markers and the resolution of the images generated.

Here, markers represent random locations where glaciers are found. Markers are stretched as required in latitude so that all markers appear circular when projected on the sphere. The markers begin as large and semi-transparent buttons, and change color, size and opacity over a period of 12 frames.

This sequence shows random dots indicating the locations of glaciers around the world on a transparent background.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
National Snow and Ice Data Center
World Data Center for Glaciology
World Glacier Monitoring Service
North American Atlas
Natural Resources Canada
The U.S. Geological Survey
The Antarctic Digital Database (copyright © 1993-2006 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research)

This page was originally published on Wednesday, August 13, 2008.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

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