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Thursday, 2 January 2014

Seriously big ice floes


I like to keep the world informed of what is going on on the ice floe front -- so here is a fantastic satellite image dated 12th July 2007 (sorry for the delay......).  This is the Scoresby Sund area of East Greenland, and there are rather freakish conditions. 

By 12th July you would normally expect the sea ice to have broken up and to have been flushed out of the fjord system completely -- but notice the extraordinary blockage of huge floes in the main part of Scoresby Sund on this occasion.  The biggest floe (the oval one which almost stretches shore to shore) is about 20 miles across, and there are several other huge ones (up to 15 miles long) as well. The ice must have been very thick in the winter of 2006-2007 -- and this thickness has prevented the floes from breaking up into small and widely dispersed slabs.  Note that this is not glacier ice, but sea ice......  although there will certainly be some real icebergs caught up in these vast "ice islands."

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