Pine Island: Constraining the Mass-Balance Deficit of the Amundsen Coast's glaciers
Pine Island Glacier is one the largest and most rapidly changing glaciers in Antarctica. These photos were acquired during a radar flight over the grounding zone of Pine Island glacier, as part of a National Science Foundation funded project to determine the regional mass balance (ice loss in this case). The grounding line represents the transition from grounded (i.e., ice sitting on rock) to floating ice.
This transition has retreated approximately 20 km (12 miles) in the last 15 years, while at the same time the fastest regions of the glacier have sped up from approximately 2500 m/yr to 4000 m/yr. The strong extension of the ice near the grounding line is evident in the heavily crevassed surface. Several photos are available showing
other activities during this field season.
| Location map
Location of flight line (red) from which photos were taken plotted over a TerraSAR-X synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image acquired in 2009. The flight began on the left side of the image and length of the segment shown is roughly 95 km. The grounding line position is shown for the years 1996 (black) and 2009 (blue).
[click to enlarge]
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East Side Rifts - 1, Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica
As Pine Island Glacier accelerated over the last decade, an accompanying series of large rifts (deep features in transition region from crevassed to smooth surface) developed on the east side of the shelf near the grounding line (see location map). A larger set of rifts formed on the western side of the shelf over the same period.
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