The Earth Story

Original caption:

Strange icebergs

NASA’s annual endeavour called Operation Icebridge that keeps tabs on the changing cryosphere in our fast warming world often brings sightings of odd and interesting features in the world’s frozen regions (see https://bit.ly/2qQefLx). The latest crop features a couple of interesting rectangular tablets of ice spotted in mid October in the sea washing the northern Antarctic Peninsula (the bit that juts out towards the tip of South America), just off the Larsen C ice shelf that the flight from Punta Arenas in Chile had set out to monitor (see https://bit.ly/2Q6TNV2). The operation’s deployment for this year ends tomorrow. Another interesting iceberg makes a telling point about the fate of the world’s ice (when there last was this much CO2 in our atmosphere there was no frozen water to be found anywhere on the planet’s surface). Part of the remnants of a huge calving event 18 years ago in the Ross ice shelf (also in Antarctica) it is shaped like a coffin, describing metaphorically the now near inevitable fate of the world’s cryosphere. Having spent years refining its shape as it circled the White Continent in the Circumpolar Current, B-15T as it is known has now shifted north into warmer waters, where it will melt away. The photo with the layer of cloud above it was taken from the International Space Station.

Loz

Image credit: NASA 2: NASA/Jeremy Harbeck

https://bit.ly/2TeqtL2 https://go.nasa.gov/2DjuGrr

A follower shared this wonderful video with us that was compiled during a bus and hiking trip from Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile through the Atacama Desert at the northern end of the country. Hot springs, glaciers, fumaroles, mountains, rainbows, Torres del Paine, and even a face to face with a penguin!