Located in the Terre Adélie-George V Land section of East Antarctica, Astrolabe Glacier streams out from the interior of Antarctica to dump ice into the sea, November 28, 2010. This outlet glacier is estimated to be 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide, and the drainage basin that feeds it stretches as much as 200 kilometers (120 miles) inland. NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using ALI data from the EO-1 Team

Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with background from Alan Buis
March 26, 2011 Located in the Terre Adélie-George V Land section of East Antarctica, Astrolabe Glacier streams out from the interior of Antarctica to dump ice into the sea. This outlet glacier is estimated to be 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide, and the drainage basin that feeds it stretches as much as 200 kilometers (120 miles) inland. Astrolabe is named for the flagship of Captain Jules Dumont d’Urville’s 19th century expedition to Antarctica. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Astrolabe on November 28, 2010, in late austral spring. Icebergs were breaking off from the glacier tongue—which extends from the coast like a shelf over the open water of the Southern Ocean—and running into sea ice. The calving front is roughly 7 kilometers (4 miles) wide, and scientists estimate that it loses half a cubic kilometer of ice per year. The ice calving shown in this image is not necessarily unusual for the region or the time of year. But what is unusual is how much more calving all the glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland have been doing in the past two decades. …

Astrolabe Glacier and Unbalanced Ice