For the past couple of years, scientists have been watching a crack slowly growing in Antarctica’s fourth largest ice shelf, Larsen-C.
The location of the crack. The arrow shows the direction of propagation.
We downloaded some Sentinel-2 images of the location and can see the approximate extent of the crack as of March 2017:
To view them in Google Earth download this KML file. Warning: older computers may struggle to load the images. We tried viewing the overlays in the new Google Earth, but it could only handle one overlay at a time. Trying to open both at once crashed WebGL.
The European Space Agency ESA (which runs the Sentinel program) produced this video showing how they used Sentinel-1 (a radar imaging satellite) to analyse the movement of the ice:
And for some aerial footage, see this video from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS):
While exploring the area in Landsat imagery we were struck by the beauty of the imagery. These two are our favourites:
Sunset in Antarctica.
Beautiful blue ice.