How deep is that icy blue water on Greenland's ice sheet? Dr. Allen Pope, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, is using data from the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite to find out. In this video, Dr. Pope shares what he sees when he looks at a Landsat image of the Greenland ice sheet just south of the Jakobshavn Glacier. Because the lakes are darker than the ice around them, they absorb more energy from the sun. A little bit of melt concentrates in one place, and then melts more, establishing a feedback mechanism accelerating the growth of the lake. When the lakes get big enough they can force open fractures that then drill all the way down to the bed of the glacier, transporting this water to the base where it can temporarily speed up the flow of the ice. Learn more about Dr. Pope's study here: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86564 NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) jointly manage the Landsat program, and the USGS preserves a 40-plus-year archive of Landsat images that is freely available over the Internet.
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NASA ID
GSFC_20150817_Landsat_m11973_Lakes_Glacier
Date Created
August 17, 2015
Center
GSFC
Media Type
video
Location
Goddard Space Flight Center
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