Floating fragments of sea ice spun into intricate patterns as ocean currents carried them south along Greenland’s east coast in spring 2024.
Floating fragments of sea ice spun into intricate patterns as ocean currents carried them south along Greenland’s east coast in spring 2024. The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured a moment of this dizzying journey on June 4, 2024.
Much of the ice has likely drifted a great distance to get to this point. The Fram Strait, a 450-kilometer (280-mile)-wide passage between Greenland and Svalbard (to the north, out of view), connects the Arctic Ocean with the Greenland Sea. It serves as the primary route for sea ice out of the Arctic. After moving through the Fram Strait, ice is swept south along the Greenland coast by the East Greenland Current.
Along the way, it breaks into smaller pieces and starts to melt in warmer ocean waters. “The smaller the floes, the more ‘wispy’ the patterns,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The small ice fragments in those swirling patterns may only be meters or tens of meters across, he said—too small to distinguish in MODIS imagery. The aggregation of small pieces imparts the look of hazy, smoke-like curls to the surface of the water.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.
