Two major Antarctic glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, are rapidly fracturing at their most vulnerable points in a process that could lead to the collapse of the floating ice shelves they are attached to.
It was detected by images and data captured by satellites and published in the journal of the American Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by the group of Stef Lhermitte, of the technical university of Delft, in the Netherlands.
The changes taking place in the two glaciers were known, but the growth of damaged areas from 1997 to 2019 has now been documented, thanks to data from the Sentinel-2 satellite of the Copernicus program, managed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission, and the Landsat satellite of NASA and the United States Geological Service (Usgs). The images indicate that in both glaciers there are areas rich in fractures and crevasses at the areas bordering the floating ice shelves.