Great and Gorgeous Glaciers
Seen from above, the beautiful abstraction reveals a looming threat—their retreat over time due to climate change.
Photograph: Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory01Great and Gorgeous Glaciers
Seen from above, the beautiful abstraction reveals a looming threat—their retreat over time due to climate change. 
Photograph: NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck02Thwaites Glacier
A gigantic cavity photographed on November 7, 2016, growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The huge cavity is under the main trunk of the glacier on its western side. In this region, as the tide rises and falls, the grounding line retreats and advances across a zone of about 2 to 3 miles. The glacier has been coming unstuck from a ridge in the bedrock at a steady rate of about 0.4 to 0.5 miles a year since 1992.
Photograph: John Sonntag/NASA03Larsen C Ice Shelf
This photograph shows a rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf as observed from NASA’s DC-8 research aircraft on November 10, 2016. An iceberg the size of Delaware broke off from the ice shelf in 2017.
Photograph: Jesse Allen and Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory04Tasman Glacier
In the first image, captured on December 30, 1990, the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand stretched like a serpentine tongue. The second image was acquired on January 29, 2017. Both false-color images use white to show frozen snow or ice, and blue for water. Brown represents bare ground, while red areas are covered in vegetation. In the 27 years between images, the ice has retreated an average of 180 meters per year.
Photograph: Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory06Excelsior Glacier
These false-color images show Excelsior Glacier and Big Johnstone Lake. The left image was acquired on October 16, 1986. The right image was acquired on October 31, 2018. In these images, various visible and infrared wavelengths were combined to better differentiate areas of water that are frozen (light blue) from those that contain significant meltwater (dark blue). Rocks are brown, and vegetation is green. Note that by 2018 the glacier had retreated to a point where the eastern and western tributaries had separated: Over the past two decades, rising temperatures have rapidly transformed ice from Alaska’s Excelsior Glacier into a lake of meltwater.
Photograph: Lauren Dauphin and Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory08Yakutat Glacier
An image of the Yakutat Glacier in Alaska shot on September 21, 2018, by the the Operational Land Imager (OLI). Yakutat has retreated more than 6 miles since 1987.
