Albedo

When looking at this striking image of an ice berg calving from the King Baudouin Ice Shelf, one readily sees the tremendous difference in the albedo from ice to water whereby the Antarctic, like the Arctic, will gradually become a heat sink due to the continual melting of the sea ice caused by global warming. Calving is a normal event but the decreased albedo on both poles is quietly disconcerting to say the least.

While large icebergs calve regularly from fast-flowing ice shelves in West Antarctica, the coast of cooler, drier East Antarctica tends to be less active. That made it a mild surprise when a 70-square-kilometer chunk of ice broke off from the King Baudouin Ice Shelf in January 2015. The last time that part of King Baudouin calved such a large iceberg was in the 1960s.

A growing rift near the edge of the glacier was visible to satellites for several weeks before the ice finally broke loose. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this image on January 24, 2015. While clouds obscured Landsat 8’s view of the new berg after January 25, a radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite captured an image of the iceberg on January 28, showing it moving away from the ice shelf. The new iceberg is now drifting in Breid Bay off of Queen Maud Land.

Seen above is one small footprint  in the vastness known as Antarctica

Science never lies when the facts ring true. :)