Pine Island Glacier spawns piglets

11-02-2020 10:27 AM CET
Pine Island Glacier, known as PIG for short

As anticipated, Pine Island Glacier, known as PIG for short, in Antarctica has just spawned a huge iceberg. At over 300 sq km, about the size of Malta, this huge berg very quickly broke into many ‘piglet’ pieces the largest of which is dubbed B-49. Thanks to images from the Copernicus Sentinel satellite missions, two large rifts in the glacier were spotted last year and scientists have been keeping a close eye on how quickly these cracks were growing. This animation uses 57 radar images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission between February 2019 and February 2020 (the last frame is from today, 11 February 2020) and shows just how quickly the emerging cracks grew and led to this calving event. Courtesy:European Space Agency