The European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites detected rapid acceleration of an Arctic glacier over the past year. The glacier, named Negribreen, is located in north Norway at the Svalbard archipelago (the same area where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that has made international headlines when thawing permafrost began to flood the vault).
When a glacier surges the ice flows to the terminus in a very rapid amount of time. Scientists believe this is caused by changes in the amount of heat or water in the layers of a glacier.
The last time Negribreen experienced a surge like this was in the 1930s, as documented in aerial photographs. At that time, it advanced almost 12 km into the fjord in one year along a 15 km-wide section of the front. Since then the front of the glacier had been steadily retreating, with large icebergs breaking off.
This latest jump in speed began in July 2016 and has been climbing ever since – even over the cold winter months.
Monitoring glaciers in areas prone to bad weather and long periods of darkness – like the Arctic – was difficult before the advent of satellites. Radar satellites can ‘see’ through clouds and in the dark, and Sentinel-1 offers frequent and systematic coverage of the Arctic.
“Sentinel-1 provides us with a near-realtime overview of glacier flow across the Arctic, remarkably augmenting our capacity to capture the evolution of glacier surges,” said Tazio Strozzi from Swiss company Gamma Remote Sensing and scientist on Glaciers_cci.
“This new information can be used to refine numerical models of glacier surging to help predict the temporal evolution of the contribution of Arctic glaciers to sea-level rise.”
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