Posts treating: "icebergs"
Friday, 01 April 2016
SAR images can see through clouds and in darkness, and are therefore very useful for operational monitoring of our seas. Detecting ships, icebergs, wind patterns, and oil spills is daily business in Europe with the Sentinel-1 satellite. Want to see for yourself how to extract information from a SAR image? In this tutorial, we’ll use the SNAP toolbox for Sentinel-1 to extract information on the number of ships at sea. Overview SAR images are often used for monitoring ship traffic, oil [...]
Stanford University’s Miles Traer, once again, is cartooning from the AGU Fall Meeting in San
West Greenland’s fjords are vastly deeper than rudimentary models have shown, allowing intruding ocean water to badly undercut glacier faces, which will raise sea levels around the world much faster than previously estimated. Those are the findings of a University of California-Irvine-led research team that battled rough waters and an onslaught of icebergs for three summers to map the remote channels for the first
GeoLog-The official blog of the European Geosciences Union [2015-06-15 13:00:24]
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(136 visits) Quaternary; US,CN,CA,KM,GL,AQ,
If lucky enough to visit Ilulissat Icefjord, you’d find yourself in a truly ancient landscape. From the up to 3.9 billion year old Precambrian rocks, to ice dating back to the Quaternary Ice Age (2.6 thousand years old) and archaeological remains which evidence the past settlement of this remote Greenlandic outpost, it’s no surprise this stunning location has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Today’s Imaggeo on Mondays photograph was taken by Camille Clerc, at Sermermiut, an old [...]
There are a lot of neat creatures living in the ocean around Antarctica: not just whales, seals, and penguins! There’s quite a diversity of invertebrates (animals without backbones) living on the ocean floor. We call these benthic invertebrates. (“Benthic” means they live on the bottom.)There are several scientists at Rothera who study these benthic invertebrates, and they shared some of their animals with me. There are some animals you are probably familiar with: sea stars (or starfish), [...]
A fortunate consequence of a calmer Drake Passage is that our progress across it was quite speedy. When we woke on the morning of the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice, we had nothing but steel blue seas and seabirds for company. … Continue reading
GeoLog-The official blog of the European Geosciences Union [2014-10-27 12:30:02]
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Thinking of the Arctic conjures up images of vast expanses of white icy landscapes punctuated by towering icebergs and a few dark rocky masses; certainly not a green landscape with a series of water pools amongst rolling hills. The image below is perhaps more reminiscent of the temperate Scottish or Welsh countryside; but don’t be
Between 16 and 11 thousand years
ago, the Fennoscandian Ice sheet, which once covered the greater Scandinavia area, collapsed. When coastal ice sheets
disappear, they don’t just melt in place.
Rather, the outflow glaciers carry the ice to the sea, where it breaks
off and floats away as icebergs, faster than snow in the interior of the ice
sheets falls and gets compressed into new ice.
But
Did you enjoy doing the Micro Geology Quiz yesterday? (See the post just below.) Now it's time to step way, way back and look at one of the biggest things on Earth, in my new article on supercontinents. These are what happens when the wandering continents, and various smaller bits of continental crust, happen to glom together in one big landmass. Supercontinents appear to have formed four times in Earth history, and another one appears to be coming up starting in about 50 million years.
Some [...]
November 7th - Glaciation of the Polar regions, James Cresswell, Geoworld TravelJames Cresswell has spent the last six years working as an expedition guide in the Polar Regions. This visual presentation, full of photos and video clips, gives an overview of the different forms and changing nature of 'ice' in these regions. The presentation discusses the great ice sheets, the floating ice shelves, as well as icebergs and sea ice. With the recent collapse of several Antarctic Ice Shelves, negative [...]
10 January 2013 A Quick Dispatch from Elephant Island We are experiencing astonishingly good weather and amazing whale sightings at our first landings near the Antarctic Peninsula. Yesterday afternoon we zodiac cruised around Point Wild, Elephant Island with icebergs, humpbacks, and fin whales, and this morning made a truly delightful landing among nesting Chinstrap Penguins
GeoLog-The official blog of the European Geosciences Union [2012-07-09 10:00:00]
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(96 visits)
Images such as the one above inspire scientists and nature lovers alike. This photograph, showing a Chilean landscape with elements representative of various Earth-science disciplines, is simply stunning. In a beautiful mix of shapes and colours, a quiet lake with floating icebergs appears tucked in between a roughed mountain in the background and a colourful
Three years ago, icebergs floated at the base of this glacier, in the milky water of a glacial lagoon. But in May 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted forcefully beneath Gígjökull, causing torrents of melted water called jökulhlaups to surge down the valley and into the lagoon, carrying with them enough boulders and debris fill it up, displacing all the
Several icebergs the size of Manhattan broke off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in West Antarctica last March as a result of the March 11, 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. It had long been theorized that tsunamis could cause glacial calving. Now NASA has proof that the Japanese tsunami caused formation of icebergs. See NASA photos
Big news from Antarctica, where it is very early spring. The Pine Island Glacier has developed a huge crack and is being monitored closely. NASA has a great video with the details: It’s normal for ice shelves break off icebergs as they reach the sea, but the rate they do so is of intense interest to those who are studying the climate of Antarctica. If this crack breaks off,
“A NASA scientist and her colleagues were able to observe for the first time the power of an earthquake and tsunami to break off large icebergs a hemisphere away.” Quoted from the NASA image
“An analysis of prehistoric “Heinrich events” that happened many thousands of years ago, creating mass discharges of icebergs into the North Atlantic Ocean, make it clear that very small amounts of subsurface warming of water can trigger a rapid collapse of ice shelves.” Quoted from the Oregon State University news
Instead of the usual bathymetric map, here’s a photograph for this week’s Seafloor Sunday image. This is from the ocean floor in Antarctica in the region where the Larsen A and B ice shelves collapsed in 2002. The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research conducted a research expedition aimed at investigating how life
“The first comprehensive study of the biological effects of Antarctic icebergs shows that they fertilize the Southern Ocean, enhancing the growth of algae that take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” Quoted from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute news
“Icebergs cool and dilute the ocean water they pass through and also affect the distribution of carbon-dioxide-absorbing phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean [...] the effects are likely to influence the growth of phytoplankton in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean and especially in an area known as “Iceberg Alley” east of the Antarctic Peninsula.”