Toward the end of 2024, less than halfway through the melt season in Antarctica, the icy continent had already seen bouts of widespread melting along its coastal areas.
Toward the end of 2024, less than halfway through the melt season in Antarctica, the icy continent had already seen bouts of widespread melting along its coastal areas. By the start of 2025, meltwater remained visible atop the ice sheet’s surface, from along the Antarctic Peninsula in the west to ice shelves in the east, including East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 acquired these images on January 1, 2025. Several glaciers—the Lambert, Mellor, and Fisher—converge near the underlying continent’s edge. This ice flows out from the coast and onto the surface of the ocean, forming the Amery Ice Shelf and filling Prydz Bay. The shelf’s southern (interior) side, near its grounding line, is visible in the middle-right of the image above. (The entire shelf is shown in this image captured by NASA’s Terra satellite.)
“The Amery is unique among Antarctic ice shelves given its long interior extent—greater than 500 kilometers (300 miles)—and extensive bordering bedrock exposures,” said Christopher Shuman, a glaciologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Yet, even in the deep chill of East Antarctica, the change of seasons causes surface melting far inland from the coastal ice front.”
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
