Located in the northwest corner of Greenland, Leidy Glacier is fed by ice from the Academy Glacier (upstream and inland). As Leidy approaches the sea, it is diverted around the tip of an island that separates the Olriks Fjord to the south and Academy Cove to the north. The resulting crisscross pattern is simply the result of ice flowing along the path of least resistance.
This view of the region pictured above was acquired August 7, 2012, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite. In April 2012, the feature caught the attention of a NASA pilot, who snapped this picture from the cockpit of a high-flying ER-2 aircraft during aresearch flight over the Greenland ice cap.
Researchers have found that the small glaciers in the area of Leidy Glacier did not change much between the winters of 2000 and 2005. That's in contrast to the Tracy and Heilprin glaciers just north of Leidy, which sped up by 40 percent and 18 percent, respectively, during the same study period.
Loss of ice to the ocean through glaciers is not the only way Greenland is losing mass. According to research published in January 2015, rivers of glacial meltwater flowing over Greenland's frozen surface may be contributing as much to global sea level rise as all other processes that drain water from the melting ice sheet combined.
References and Further Reading
- Joughin, I. et al., (2010, August) Greenland flow variability from ice-sheet-wide velocity mapping. Journal of Glaciology 56 (197), 415-430(16).
- NASA Feature, NASA's ER-2 Completes MABEL Validation Deployment. Accessed January 21, 2015.
- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rivers are Draining Greenland Quickly. Accessed January 21, 2015.
- Rignot, E. and Kanagaratnam, P., (2006, February 17) Changes in the Velocity Structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet.Science 311 (5763), 986-990.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./JapanASTER Science Team. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.
- Instrument(s):
- Terra - ASTER - NASA
