Ayles Ice Shelf Breakup Viewed from Overhead

  • Released Monday, May 28, 2007
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On August 13, 2005, almost the entire Ayles Ice Shelf calved from the northern edge of Ellesmere Island. This continues the trend of dramatic loss of these ice shelves over the past century, reducing the remaining ice shelves there from six to five. Since 1900, approximately 90% of the Ellesmere Island ice shelves have calved and floated away. There is insufficient new ice formation to replace the ice that has been lost. The Ayles calving event was the largest in at least the last 25 years; a total of 87.1 sq km (33.6 sq miles) of ice was lost in this event, of which the largest piece was 66.4 sq km (25.6 sq. miles) in area. This piece is equivalent in size to approximately 11,000 football fields or a little larger than the island of Manhattan.

Animation zooms to view the ice shelf from overhead and sequences through the satellite images showing the breakup. The overlay shows the region of interest and the date and time.

This animation is identical to the above animation except that it has been reformatted to fit standard definition NTSC with a 4x3 aspect ratio.

The animation is identical to the first animation above but does not show the overlay that contains the date and the ice shelf locator.

This animation is identical to the above animation except that it has been reformatted to fit standard definition NTSC with a 4x3 aspect ratio.

Image of Ayles ice shelf on August 13, 2005 at time 00:55 GMT

Image of Ayles ice shelf on August 13, 2005 at time 00:55 GMT

Image of Ayles ice shelf on August 14, 2005 at time 00:00 GMT.

Image of Ayles ice shelf on August 14, 2005 at time 00:00 GMT.

Overlay with a box outlining the region of interest, an area indicating the ice shelf and a date bar.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio The Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

This page was originally published on Monday, May 28, 2007.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.

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