ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

Water isn't the only thing flowing around islands. Clouds, storms, plankton, sand, dust, and volcanic eruptions stream past too.
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Semisopochnoi Island (right), Little Sitkin Island (left) and Amchitka Island (bottom), Aleutian Islands, Alaska, North Pacific. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Akimiski Island, Nunavut, Canada, Hudson Bay. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

 

Canary Islands, North Atlantic, with Saharan dust. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Iceland, North Atlantic, with low pressure system. Credit: NASA Visible Earth.

   

Ireland, North Atlantic, with phytoplankton blooms. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Isla Fernandina with erupting volcano, Isla Isabela, Galápagos Islands, Pacific Ocean. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

 

Juan de Nova Island, Mozambique Channel, Indian Ocean, with coral reefs flowing off underwater flanks. Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center.

 

Jan Mayen Island, Greenland Sea, with cloud vortices. Credit: NASA.

Bimini, Bahamas, North Atlantic, with deep Gulf Stream flowing northward on the left, shallow calcium carbonate banks on the right. The island is the setting for part one of Ernest Hemingway's novel Islands in the Stream. Credit: NASA.

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CRAAZY CURRENTS

World Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

NASA/Goddard has stunning images up at their Scientific Visualization Studio showing sea surface currents colored by sea surface temperature data. From the explainer:

This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL's computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2. ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization.

Pacific Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

Here's the insanely beautiful eddies of my home ocean, the Pacific. Note the superhighways of the Equatorial currents that run so much of Earth's climate via the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation. And note the powerful Kuroshio Current off Japan (upper left) currently carrying that nation's tsunami debris towards North America.

North Atlantic Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

  

In this view of the North Atlantic you can see the data-rich regions—the places where oceanographers have been cranking out the studies for decades—throughout the Caribbean and up the Gulf Stream through to the North Atlantic Drift en route to Europe.

  

Indian Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

What pops for me in this Indian Ocean image is the crazy interference patterns around the Cape of Good Hope (bottom left quadrant) where the Benguela and the powerful Agulhas currents spin up some stuff known as mesoscale eddies... and the way those ripple through the system into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

The movement in the animation is subtle and hypnotic.

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SATELLITE VIEW OF GLOBAL ICE MELT

Bear Glacier, Alaska. Via.

 
A new paper in Nature calculates that total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica, and all Earth's glaciers and ice caps between 2003 and 2010 was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles).
  
That's enough melted ice to drive up global sea level by 0.5 inches (12 millimeters).
  
And that's enough water to cover the US to 1.5 feet deep (0.5 meters deep).

Glacier melt tunnel. Credit: Dook Cook | DougAK via Flickr.

  
The research was based on satellite measurements of ice loss from all Earth's land ice collected over eight years—with attention paid to rarely-observed glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
  
The findings:

• About a quarter of the average annual ice loss came from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica (roughly 148 billion tons, or 39 cubic miles). 
• Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica and their peripheral ice caps and glaciers averaged 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) a year.

Glacier Bay, Alaska. Credit: NPS.

  
Traditional estimates of Earth's ice caps and glaciers have been made using ground measurements from only a few hundred of the roughly 200,000 glaciers worldwide.
  
This video explains some of those traditional ground-based measurement techniques.
  


  
This video describes how the GRACE satellite measurements work.
  

  
One positive finding of the satellite study was that ice loss from high the high Asian ranges—from the Himalaya, Pamir, and Tien Shan mountains—was only about 4 billion tons of ice a year. Previous ground-based estimates ranged as high as 50 billion tons a year.
  
From NASA News:

"This study finds that the world's small glaciers and ice caps in places like Alaska, South America and the Himalayas contribute about 0.02 inches per year to sea level rise," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "While this is lower than previous estimates, it confirms that ice is being lost from around the globe, with just a few areas in precarious balance. The results sharpen our view of land-ice melting, which poses the biggest, most threatening factor in future sea level rise." 

Bering Glacier, Alaska. Credit: NASA.

The paper:

• Thomas Jacob, John Wahr, W. Tad Pfeffer & Sean Swenson. Recent contributions of glaciers and ice caps to sea level rise. Nature. DOI:10.1038/nature10847

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HOME IN HIGH-DEF

Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

  
This gorgeous high-def image of Earth was taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP.

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ATOLL

Credits, top to bottom:

1. Mataiva Atoll, Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia. 
2. Bokak Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
3. Arno Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.
4. Tetiaro Atoll, Society Islands, French Polynesia. 
5. Pearl and Hermes Atolls, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. 
6. Bikini Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands. 
7. Atafa Atoll, Tokelau Islands.
8. Nukuoro Atoll, Federated States of Micronesia.
9. The Tuamotu Archipelago, chain of atolls, French Polynesia. 
10. Malosmadulu Atolls, Maldives.

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ULTIMATE WORLD CRUISE

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

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TODAY'S PACIFIC

20 Nov 2011, 2100 UTC. Credit: NOAA-NASA GOES Project.

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RIVER'S END

Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, India and Bangladesh

Amazon River, Brazil

Yukon River, Alaska

Lena River, Russia

Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Rivers, the Netherlands

Irrawaddy River, Burma

Mackenzie River, Canada

Saskatchewan River, Canada

Niger River, Mali

Nile River, by night, Egypt

All satellite eye candy courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.

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SEA ICE

Above, a timelapse of sea ice forming off Estonia.


Ice Breaking aboard the Akademik Shokalskiy from Finn O'Hara on Vimeo.

Above, icebreaking off Greenland, with a jaunty soundtrack and fogbows.

All photos courtesy NASA:

1. Sea ice under the combined influences of wind and ocean currents forms a frosty filigree along Kamchatka's volcano-dominated coastline, Russia.
2. Icebergs along Princess Ragnhild Coast, Antarctica.
3. Icebergs calving from East Antarctica's Matusevich Glacier.
4. Barnes Ice Cap, Baffin Island, Canada. 
5. Parry Channel, Canada. 
6. Neumayer Glacier, South Georgia Island.
7. Greenland coast.
8. Yukon River Delta, Alaska.
9. Guano-stained ice, the mark of emperor penguin colonies, visible below the bergs frozen into the ice in the center of this image of Antarctica’s Luitpold Coast.

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