In March 2022, old sea ice crumbled away as new ice formed off the coast of Antarctica’s Marie Byrd Land.
Sea ice around Antarctica started to regrow after reaching the lowest extent ever observed in the satellite record in late February 2022. But on local scales, this transition from melting to freezing can display nuance. For example, near Land Glacier in West Antarctica, an area of old sea ice broke up as new ice formed in March. Around the same time, part of the glacier’s ice tongue crumbled away.
Michael Lowe, an analyst at the U.S. National Ice Center who pointed out the changes, has been closely watching this part of the Antarctic coastline, known as Marie Byrd Land. “I've had my eye on that area over the past two months as a large area of very old fast ice began to break apart,” Lowe said. “When comparing two SAR images from consecutive days I saw that the tip of the Land Glacier was starting to break up.”
The changes are also apparent in this pair of natural-color images acquired on February 24 and March 23, 2022, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, respectively.
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory
