Whorls of Sea Ice off Greenland | NASA Terra Earth Satellite

Whorls of Sea Ice off Greenland | NASA Terra Earth Satellite

This satellite image shows the southern part of Greenland covered with white snow and ice. To the right of the island, smooth, white swirls of sea ice top the ocean, bordered to the right by dark, nearly black areas of open water.

Greenland is an icy place year-round, but the winter months bring extra whorls of white. This satellite image, captured on February 24, 2025, shows the southern part of the island, from its snow-topped ice sheet and glaciers to the sea ice swirling along its coasts. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

Seasonal snow gives the ice sheet a fresh white appearance. (Note that part of the ice sheet toward the south is covered by patchy clouds.) In contrast, melting in the summer months can expose dark-colored particles that have accumulated near the ice sheet’s perimeter, giving it a brown tinge.

The southeastern side of the island pictured here includes about 340 kilometers (210 miles) of the island’s coast. Like other parts of the island’s perimeter, it is lined with numerous fjords—narrow inlets through which glacial ice flows from the land into the ocean.

Just offshore, sea ice floats atop the water of the North Atlantic Ocean. According to Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), much of this is young “drifting ice” that formed locally in the previous few days. A portion of it, he notes, could be older ice from the north that was carried south by the strong East Greenland Current.

The ice traces eddies formed by winds and ocean currents, giving the ice “wispy spiral patterns,” said Angela Bliss, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She notes that toward the east, the ice encounters the warmer waters of the West Spitsbergen Current. This prevents the ice from drifting even farther from the coast.

Still deep in the winter season, sea ice across the Arctic continues to grow. When this image was acquired, the sea ice extent along Greenland’s East Coast was about average. However, Arctic-wide, sea ice in late February was exceptionally low for the time of year due to a warm winter. Scientists like Meier and Bliss will continue to watch the sea ice growth until it reaches its annual maximum extent around early March.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/WorldviewTerra — MODIS
Article Credit: Kathryn Hansen
Capture Date: February 24, 2025
Release Date: February 26, 2025

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