The altering face of the Chilean glaciers within the Laguna San Rafael Nationwide Park is featured in these satellite tv for pc pictures from 1987 and 2024.
Positioned on the Pacific coast of southern Chile, the park covers an space of round 17 000 sq km and consists of the Northern Patagonian Ice Discipline – a remnant of the Patagonian Ice Sheet that after lined the area. As we speak, regardless of the ice discipline being only a fraction of its earlier measurement, it’s nonetheless the second largest steady mass of ice outdoors the polar areas.
As we will see within the pictures, the ice mass feeds glaciers which have modified in measurement between 1987 and 2024. The Landsat-5 picture on the left was acquired on 9 February 1987, whereas the picture on the fitting captured the ice discipline on 9 February 2024 as seen by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
The west a part of the Northern Patagonian Ice Discipline feeds 28 exit glaciers. The biggest two, San Rafael and San Quintín, are pictured right here. Each glaciers have been receding dramatically as a consequence of international warming.
The San Rafael glacier, within the higher left, is among the most actively calving glaciers on this planet. It calves west in the direction of the Pacific Ocean and into an arc-shaped lake, Laguna San Rafael, seen on to the left of the glacier. The lake is fashioned and fed by the retreat of the glacier.
Like Laguna San Rafael, many lakes within the space are fed by water from melting glaciers. Within the pictures, the color of the water varies from darkish blue to aquamarine relying on the quantity of suspended superb sediment current. This sediment is named ‘glacier milk’ and is a results of abrasion as glaciers transfer over the underlying rock. That is significantly clear in San Rafael lake, the place we will additionally see icebergs floating within the water.
Straight beneath San Rafael lies the San Quintín glacier, the second largest within the ice discipline. The glacier drains to the west and, taking a better have a look at its terminus in each pictures, we will see how, in 1987, the glacier virtually terminated on land, however, with its retreat, the basin full of water and fashioned the proglacial lake we see in 2024.
Glaciers all over the world are affected by local weather change. As temperatures rise and glaciers and ice sheets soften, the water finally runs into the ocean, inflicting sea ranges to rise. Rising seas are one of the crucial distinctive and doubtlessly devastating penalties of Earth’s warming local weather.
Satellite tv for pc observations can enormously contribute to the exact monitoring of glacier change. The tempo at which glaciers are dropping mass in the long run is essential to creating knowledgeable future adaptation choices.
