Ayles Ice Shelf Breakup Viewed from Northwest Coastline

  • 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 as seen from the northwest coastline and sequences through the satellite images showing the ice shelf breakup. An overlay shows the date and time, the region of interest and the area of the ice shelf broken.

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 containing the date, region of interest outline and ice shelf area.

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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