Satellite images revealing an Arctic ice cap destabilizing at “unexpected and unprecedented” speed have scientists questioning the long-term stability of some of the Earth’s polar ice caps.
Satellite images revealing an Arctic ice cap destabilizing at “unexpected and unprecedented” speed have scientists questioning the long-term stability of some of the Earth’s polar ice caps.
A time lapse video using the images shows a portion of the Vavilov Ice Cap in northern Russia thinning and slowly spreading into the Kara Sea from 1985 until 2010, when the process began to accelerate. Between 2015 and 2016, deterioration had dramatically surged and the ice front had spilled more than 5 kilometers into the sea.
The images and data appear in the multi-institutional and multinational study “Massive Destabilization of an Arctic Ice Cap,” published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Read more at Cornell University
Image via Pixabay
