Greenland is an icy place year-round, but the winter months bring extra whorls of white.
Greenland is an icy place year-round, but the winter months bring extra whorls of white. This satellite image, captured on February 24, 2025, shows the southern part of the island, from its snow-topped ice sheet and glaciers to the sea ice swirling along its coasts. The image was acquired by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
Seasonal snow gives the ice sheet a fresh white appearance. (Note that part of the ice sheet toward the south is covered by patchy clouds.) In contrast, melting in the summer months can expose dark-colored particles that have accumulated near the ice sheet’s perimeter, giving it a brown tinge.
The southeastern side of the island pictured here includes about 340 kilometers (210 miles) of the island’s coast. Like other parts of the island’s perimeter, it is lined with numerous fjords—narrow inlets through which glacial ice flows from the land into the ocean.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.
