Video: Pine Island Glacier spawns 'piglets'
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 - 11:20
in Earth & Climate
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 10 February 2020) and shows just how quickly the emerging cracks grew and led to this calving event.