# Ice Island Calves off Petermann Glacier, August 5, 2010

GSFC · 2017-12-08

Original title: Ice Island calves off Petermann Glacier (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_e002041

## What you would see

A natural-color satellite view looking straight down on northwestern Greenland, defined by the stark contrast between land, ice, and water. At the center and extending north, a long glacial tongue of bright, smooth white ice winds from the interior ice sheet toward a dark fjord; its northern tip is clearly fractured, with a detached, oblong iceberg floating a short distance away, surrounded by deep navy, almost black waters. The surrounding bedrock appears in muted browns, ochres, and grays, rugged and mountainous, with incised valleys and scattered white patches of lingering snow. To the north and west, a mottled mix of fragmented sea ice and low clouds creates a speckled texture of white, pale gray, and soft blue, partly translucent. The illumination is even and diffuse, typical of daytime satellite observation, with no strong shadows, allowing crisp definition of ice edges, subtle crevasses along the glacier, and the immense scale of the landscape, where the iceberg looks small from space though it spans dozens of kilometers.

## How to look at it

Start at the long white glacial tongue in the center and follow it north to the dark rift where the iceberg broke away. Then compare the isolated, drifting berg with the broken sea-ice mosaic and clouds to the north to grasp the scale and fragility of the ice.

## Context

This natural-color image was acquired on August 5, 2010, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, about ten hours after the event was first detected by NASA’s Aqua satellite. It shows a massive iceberg, roughly 251 square kilometers or 97 square miles in size, that had just calved from Petermann Glacier on Greenland’s northwestern coast. According to the source, the glacier lost about one quarter of its 70-kilometer floating ice shelf, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere. Detected by the Canadian Ice Service, it was the largest Arctic calving event since 1962. The image is part of the NASA Image and Video Library credited to NASA/GSFC.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-spark-open-1026; trust the source)

## Curious detail

The 2010 berg, informally called Petermann Ice Island, was so large that researchers tracked it for months as a moving island as it drifted southward through the North Atlantic.

## Questions

- How does seeing a glacial calving from the distant, detached view of a satellite change its meaning compared to a ground-level view?
- How does your sense of scale shift when you learn the small white piece is the size of a major city?
- In what ways can a scientific image also serve as a historical record of climate change?

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

1. What exact day does the satellite image of the Petermann Glacier calving show?
2. What color does the deep fjord water appear where the newly separated iceberg floats?
3. Which NASA sensor captured this image and on which satellite does it travel?

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