It flows, together with Thwaites Ice Stream, into the Amundsen Sea embayment in West Antarctica, and the two ice streams together drain ~5% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet1. And it's a … Science 291, 862-864 (2001). Annals of Glaciology 34, 277-282 (2002). Free online lecture: The Glaciers are melting: What happens next? Answer to: Where is the Pine Island Glacier? This gives a total of 33 to 132 cm of global total sea level rise by 2100. NASA Earth Observatory animation by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite from 2000 to 2019. (2012) predict recession over the next 200 years with huge uncertainty over the rate of retreat, and full collapse of the trunk of Pine Island Glacier during the 22nd Century remains a possibility15. Rift in Antarctic Glacier: A Unique Chance to Study Ice Shelf Retreat. http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/pine-island-glacier-2013-iceberg-rift-update/ Pine Island Glacier, along with neighboring Thwaites Glacier, is one of the main pathways for ice entering the Amundsen Sea from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.Pine Island is also one the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica. The U.S. National Ice Center assigns names to sizeable icebergs depending on the quadrant of Antarctica in which the berg was first sighted. You can also see how the surface of both the ice stream and ice shelf is heavily crevassed, making it difficult to walk on the surface of the ice. The event produced a number of sizeable icebergs including B-41, which was still close to the shelf when this image was acquired on November 26, 2015. By signing up, you'll get thousands of step-by-step solutions to your homework questions. The ice front at Pine Island Glacier in a more or less stable position from 1973 to 2014, and then a startling retreat in 2015 through the present. National/Naval Ice Center. Ice Flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Rignot, E. Ice-shelf changes in Pine Island Bay, Antarctica, 1947-2000. The ice shelf currently loses around 62.3 ± 5 Gigatonnes per year of ice through calving, and loses 101.2 ± 8 Gigatonnes per year through basal melting24. Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest ice streams in Antarctica. Because it is grounded in ever deeper sea water, it is vulnerable to melting at its base and rapid grounding line migration. Pine Island Glacier, in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, has an area of 175,000 square kilometres and loses about 45 billion tons of ice each year. However, scientists have several ingenious ways in which they can observe changes to this fragile, important ice stream. Journal of Glaciology 27: 518-525. Pine Island Glacier: Satellite animation mid-2017 to Feb-2020 Date: February 11, 2020 Author: adrianluckman Updated animation showing the last three calving events as seen by ESA’s Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar. Until this point, large icebergs were calving from Pine Island Glacier every four to six years. It is possible that these fractures could spawn a new iceberg in 2019. Pine Island Glacier flows at rates of up to 4000 m per year2. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 364, 1637-1655 (2006). What is the global volume of land ice and how is it changing? In mid-October 2011, NASA scientists working in Antarctica discovered a massive crack across the Pine Island Glacier, a major ice stream that drains the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 15. Located near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula—the “thumb” of the continent—the glacier lies more than 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) from the tip of South America. Images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite from 2000 to 2019. Some studies have suggested that the entire main trunk of Pine Island Glacier could unground and become afloat within 100 years14, but more recent modelling efforts suggest that much longer timescales are needed to unground the entire trunk2. Remote Sensing. The Pine Island Glacier is located around 1,600 miles from the tip of South America. 14. & Dutrieux, P. Stronger ocean circulation and increased melting under Pine Island Glacier ice shelf. (It is possible that the calving occurred one day prior, but clouds prevented a clear look.) Decline of West Antarctic Glaciers Appears Irreversible. The lists include outlet glaciers, valley glaciers, cirque glaciers, tidewater glaciers and ice streams. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 280, 51-60 (2009). NASA Earth Observatory map by Lauren Dauphin, using Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) data from the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota. 19. An iceberg has broken off Pine Island Glacier (PIG) on the edge of Antarctica, according to satellite images taken Tuesday by the European Space Agency (ESA). Pine Island Glacier has long been on the radar screen of Antarcticresearchers. Image development and design by Lauren Dauphin. The surface of the ice sheet is exaggerated by 4x while the topography below sea level is exaggerated by 15x for the purpose of clarity. It can dive to 1600 m and travel 400 km, and it has a clever collision avoidance system. In August 2015, the U.S. National Ice Center reported that a calving event had occurred in the darkness of winter, likely in late July. For example, data collected during science flights in 2009 led researchers to discover a deep-water channel (map below) that could funnel warm water to the glacier’s underbelly and melt it from below. It’s about eight times the size of New York, or half the size of Greater London, at 720 km2. Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest ice streams in Antarctica, and drains much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Wingham, D.J., Wallis, D.W. & Shepherd, A. Spatial and temporal evolution of Pine Island Glacier thinning, 1995-2006. Pine Island Glacier could collapse – stagnate and retreat far up into the bay, resulting in rapid sea level rise – within the next few centuries, raising global sea levels by 1.5 m11,12, out of a total of 3.3 m from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet13. Last month, scientists also recorded unusually warm water beneath the Thwaites Glacier, a neighbour to Pine Island. The ice sheet in this area is grounded up to 2000 m below sea level, making it intrinsically unstable6 and susceptible to rapid melting at its base, and to rapid migration of the grounding line up the ice stream7 (see Marine Ice Sheet Instability). The recently calved iceberg may be 720 km2, but that’s the least of this ice stream’s worries. Most people will never see Pine Island Glacier in person. Notice that there are times when the front appears to stay in the same place or even advance, though the overall trend is toward retreat. Pinpointing the exact birthdate of icebergs using natural color images can be a challenge. Jenkins, A., Dutrieux, P., Jacobs, S.S., McPhail, S.D., Perrett, J.R., Webb, A.T. & White, D. Observations beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and implications for its retreat. More work at a higher resolution, combined with modelling studies, is required to fine-tune and better understand the longer-term history of Pine Island Glacier. Sea ice keeps ships away, making it difficult to access the ice stream from the ocean. NASA Earth Observatory image by Holli Riebeek, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The pattern indicated stresses at the center of the ice shelf. Snow and Ice Sometime between November 9 and November 11, 2013, a large iceberg separated from the front of Pine Island Glacier. The berg, named B-31, measured 700 square kilometers. Pine Island Glacier is buttressed by a large, floating ice shelf, which helps to stabilise the glacier, but this ice shelf is itself thinning and recently calved a huge iceberg. As the ice shelf thins, more water is able to circulate beneath it22, exacerbating the problem and encouraging further melting. It is out of balance. If the ice isn’t in fact that surprisingly low density, I would suggest you correct that. Breakup Week. Check out some photographs from that flight here. Pine Island Glacier, the longest and fastest flowing ice stream in the Antarctic, is now very probably in a headlong, self-sustaining retreat, say scientists. More recently, calving has occurred on a near-annual basis and the bergs tend to break up more easily into smaller pieces. The acceleration stretches the glacier, causing the thinning and likely making the ice more prone to crevassing (cracking) “upstream.”. Pine Island Glacier drains much of the marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and it has a configuration susceptible to rapid disintegration and recession. View All Images in This Event: Pine Island Glacier in Retreat. This photo, shot by NASA science writer Kate Ramsayer during a research flight on November 7, 2018, shows sea ice between Pine Island Glacier and the newly calved Iceberg B-46. Researchers operating special ship-mounted sonar gear found a series of 25-mile-wide channels in the seafloor that bring warm water to the base of the Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers. As anticipated, Pine Island Glacier, known as PIG for short, in Antarctica has just spawned a huge iceberg. & Anderson, J.B. Reconstruction of the West Antarctic ice sheet in Pine Island Bay during the Last Glacial Maximum and its subsequent retreat history. By October 15, fragments had already fallen below 70 square kilometers (20 square nautical miles)—the minimum size required for tracking by the U.S. National Ice Center. Ice streams are a type of glacier and many of them have “glacier” in their name, e.g. Mike Shortt working with scientists at the British Antarctic Survey is making a series of radar-based ice thickness measurements that resolve melting rates of the ice of periods of days to months. A team of European researchers has monitored the glacier since massive cracks were detected near the age in October 2019. It remains difficult to assess how soon a collapse of Pine Island Glacier could occur, but a new paper by Bamber and Aspinall (2013) suggest that there is a growing view that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could become unstable over the next 100 years16. And it's a … At the Last Glacial Maximum, circa 18,000 years ago, the ice stream was at the continental shelf edge27. NASA’s Operation IceBridge flew over the berg that same day. Shepherd, A., Wingham, D.J., Mansley, J.A.D. … & van Meijgaard, E. Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling. Learn how your comment data is processed. Nature Geoscience 3, 468-472 (2010). Low lying cloud often makes flying hazardous. It’s acronym is PIG. Geology 39, 691-694 (2011). However, this iceberg calving event is a natural process, part of how the ice shelf regularly calves – this ice shelf spawns huge icebergs every 6-10 years. Pine Island has contributed more to sea level rise over the past four decades than any other glacier in Antarctica, and as a consequence has become one of its most intensively and extensively investigated ice stream systems. It flows, together with Thwaites Ice Stream, into the Amundsen Sea embayment in West Antarctica, and the two ice streams together drain ~5% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet 1. & Vaughan, D.G. These two glaciers have been losing ice over the last 25 years. That’s shorter than a cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles, but there are no runways on the glacier and no infrastructure. Pine Island Glacier. & Cornford, S.L. NASA Goddard Space The Pine Island Glacier (a.k.a. 23. An image from MODIS on the Aqua satellite first showed Iceberg B-27 on September 28, 2007.
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