Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica Flyover of Pine Island Glacier
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- Visualizations by:
- Lori Perkins
- View full credits
The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is a data product funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and jointly produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The LIMA data shown here uses the pan-chromatic band and has a resolution of 15 meters per pixel. The 13 swaths used to generate this sample mosaic where acquired between December 25, 1999 and December 31, 2001. The elevation data shown has no vertical exaggeration (1x) and is courtesy of the Radarsat Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP) Digital Elevation Model (DEM).

Iceberg factory on Thwaites Glacier (75 °S, 108°W) Accelerated motion at the seaward edge of the glacier and flexing of the floating ice shelf by ocean tides combine to create rows of weaker ice. Eventually a line of weakness fails and a large plate of ice is torn loose from the glacier creating a tabular iceberg which can be as much as a hundred kilometers across but is usually only a few hundred meters thick. These large icebergs can bash into each other like buses in a crowded parking lot before coming free in the open ocean.

An Ice Shelf near Pine Island Glacier - Ice sheets matter because they can change sea level—-fast. When ice sheets grow, ocean level sinks. This usually happens very slowly because ice sheet growth is limited by the amount of snow that falls. When ice sheets shrink, sea level rises and records of past sea level show this happens generally faster than ice sheet growth, with periods of very rapid sea level rise indicating very rapid loss of ice.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio LIMA Data provided by: Patricia Vornberger (SAIC) LIMA data produced by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and NASA
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Animator
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Bob Bindschadler (NASA/GSFC)
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Producer
- Andrew Freeberg (NASA/GSFC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
Landsat-7 Band Combination 3, 2, 1 (Collected with the ETM+ sensor)
Dataset can be found at: http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/wrs.html
See more visualizations using this data setLandsat-7 LIMA (A.K.A. Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica) (Collected with the ETM+ sensor)
Mosaicing to avoid clouds produced a high quality, nearly cloud-free benchmark data set of Antarctica for the International Polar Year from images collected primarily during 1999-2003.
Dataset can be found at: http://lima.nasa.gov/
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.