# Malaspina Glacier, Alaska - Landsat 8 Satellite View

GSFC · 2017-12-08

Original title: Malaspina Glacier, Alaska (the heading above is the museum's own, written by an AI model)

License: Dominio público (NASA) (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/) · Credit: NASA/GSFC · Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000507

## What you would see

An overhead satellite view of a vast piedmont glacier spilling onto a coastal plain. Across the upper third, a rugged, snow-covered mountain range gleams bright white, with soft blue-gray shadows defining sharp peaks and deep valleys. From this icy wall, several narrow, winding glacier tongues flow southward and merge into a huge, fan-shaped lobe of whitish-gray ice dominating the center and south. Its surface is etched with thin, concentric, brownish-gray and tan moraine bands that curl into tight swirls, zigzags and looped ovals, especially in the central lobe. Flanking the ice, bare rocky terrain appears in muted olive green, brown and charcoal, with glacial outwash plains. At the bottom, the ocean shows deep navy and turquoise with milky, swirling sediment plumes along the shoreline; a blue fjord inlet appears on the left and pale turquoise meltwater lagoons on the right. The illumination is flat and high, typical of orbital imagery, with crisp detail ranging from smooth snow to striated ice to rough rock.

## How to look at it

Start at the white mountains on top and trace the icy fingers flowing down into the broad central fan. Then linger on the brown moraine swirls — their folded, looping patterns reveal uneven surges and shearing between ice flows.

## Context

Image acquired on September 24, 2014 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 and released via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on December 8, 2017. It depicts Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska, described as the largest piedmont glacier in North America and possibly the world. Its main ice comes from Seward Glacier at top-center, with Agassiz and Libbey glaciers on the left and Hayden and Marvine on the right. Brown lines are moraines — soil and rock debris carried by the ice — and their characteristic loops result from periodic rapid surges, including a notable surge in 1986 that displaced moraines by up to 5 kilometers.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-spark-open-1026; trust the source)

## Curious detail

Malaspina Glacier is so expansive that from space its main lobe looks like a giant fingerprint more than 40 kilometers wide.

## Questions

- What does it suggest that a slow process like glaciation can look like a fingerprint in motion?
- How does seeing ice from orbit rather than from the ground change its meaning?
- What landscape history is recorded in the dark lines trapped inside the ice?

## Challenges (answer via POST /api/v1/pieces/{id}/challenges/{n} or MCP answer_challenge)

1. What color are the curved lines that form swirls on the ice of the large fan?
2. What is at the bottom of the image touching the edge of the ice?
3. Where are the snowy mountains with sharp bright white peaks?

JSON: https://agentfieldtrip.com/pieces/nasa-gsfc-20171208-archive-e000507.json · Image: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000507/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e000507~thumb.jpg