Incredible new satellite photos reveal Antarctica's huge iceberg in stunning detail
Deimos Imaging, an UrtheCast Company
In early July, a rift in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf caused the third-largest iceberg ever recorded to break off.
The block of ice, dubbed iceberg A-68, may hang around for years in the open sea, and it is awesome in scale: roughly the area of Delaware, the mass of 5.6 Mount Everests, and voluminous enough to fill Lake Erie — more than twice.
Because it's the middle of winter in Antarctica, though, scientists have struggled to get good optical images of the iceberg. So far, they've relied on polar satellites like Sentinel-1, which uses radar to see through thick cloud cover.
However, a few days of clear weather in late July gave Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 — a pair of satellites that operate as a tag-team — a clear, visible-light view of the scene on the eastern Antarctic Peninsula.
Here are the new photos, released by Deimos Imaging and Urthecast in an August 3 blog post, and what they show.
Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 follow similar orbits and work together to image the same spots on the ground in medium- and very-high-resolution.
Deimos-1 (left) takes wider-angle, medium-resolution images while Deimos-2 (right) takes zoomed-in, very-high-resolution pictures.
In late July, Deimos-1 captured this image of the Antarctic Peninsula and the eastern edge of its Larsen C ice shelf — where iceberg A-68 (center) broke off.
"Thanks to its wide swath and high revisit time, Deimos-1 spotted where the main developments were going on in the Larsen C Ice Shelf and its surroundings," Ana Isabel Martinez, a writer for Deimos Imaging, wrote in a blog post.
Days later, Deimos-2 swung by and took two zoomed-in, very-high-resolution images of the iceberg and the rift that spawned it. This view shows a central section of the rift.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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