Animation: West Antarctic Ice Shelves Tearing Apart at the Seams (VIDEO)

University of Texas at Austin

Caption

In this series of Landsat images of the outer edge of Pine Island Glacier from 1972 to 2011, you can see how the coastline (red line) advances seaward, then shifts back inland as large masses of ice calve off, and then starts the cycle over again. Meanwhile, the northern shear margin (above center), where the glacier clings to neighboring ice or rock, fractures and retreats.

Credit

Joseph MacGregor (University of Texas at Austin/Institute for Geophysics) and NASA.

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