Landsat's Global View of Ice Velocity

This visualization shows the seasonal ice velocity on the Heimdal Glacier in Greenland between October 2013 and October 2016. The color of the flow vectors represent the speed of the flow, with purple representing the slow moving ice and red showing the fast ice. The color scale is displayed in the lower left corner.This video is also available on our YouTube channel. The NASA/USGS Landsat 8 mission has allowed new views of the Earth’s glaciers. By tracking displacement of local surface features through the seasons on outlet glaciers from the large ice sheets, researchers from the University of Alaska, the University of Bristol, and the University of Colorado have been able to show that each glacier around Greenland has a unique pattern of flow variation through the seasons. Seasonal variations, seen in this animation on the lower 25 kilometers of Heimdal Glacier in southeast Greenland, are caused by a combination of processes. For Heimdal, the largest forcing for flow variation is likely the input of increasing amounts of surface melt water through the Spring and Summer, but there is also an interplay between calving of ice from the end of the glacier, flow acceleration as shown in the animation, and thinning of the ice due to the extra stretching from the faster flow. By measuring these changes in flow on seasonal timescales, scientists can develop a better understanding of what controls the flow of these glaciers where they meet the ocean. This understanding will improve our ability to anticipate flow responses of these systems in a warming climate. The above visualization without the date or color bar. The date and colorbar with transparency.