To celebrate Halloween, European Space Agency (ESA) brings you this recent image of the Halloween crack in Antarctica taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. Halloween crack was first discovered on October 31, 2016, and it flows through an area in Antarctica called the "McDonald Ice Tumor" - a place where the bottom of the floating ice is grounded at the shallow sea bottom, which slows the flow of ice and breaks the ice surface.
Images of Halloween cracks in Antarctica taken by Copernicus Sentinel 2. The image was taken on October 25, 2022. The picture contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Halloween cracks are currently stable, adjacent to the more unstable tip of the Brut Ice Shelf. This tip of the ice shelf is suspended-it is now secured only by a narrow band of ice about 600 meters (2,000 feet) long at the northern end of the long crack cut to the west and the remaining east.
uses radar images of the Copernicus Sentinel One mission, this animation shows the evolution of two ice cracks from September 2016 to mid-October 2019. The large crack extending north is called Fracture 1, while the crack extending east is called Halloween crack. Image source contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016-19), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
If this potential break point finally gives way, a huge iceberg of approximately 1750 square kilometers (675 square miles) is expected to produce. To compare size, this is about two-thirds of the size of Rhode Island, or more than five times the size of Malta .
Since ice shelves are floating, these icebergs do not actually increase sea level rise when they form icebergs. However, the ice shelves brake the speed at which glaciers on land flow to the sea. Antarctica's ice shelves are weakening due to climate change, resulting in greater risk of more land ice cubes eventually entering the ocean. This will therefore increase sea level rise , which is arguably a more terrible thing than Halloween.
routine monitoring by satellite with different observational capabilities provides an unprecedented perspective on events occurring in remote areas like Antarctica and how ice shelves respond to changes in ice dynamics, air and ocean temperature.
