A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite has captured the image of a crack over 28 kilometers long, 244 meters across, and 55 meters deep. NASA scientists said Friday that in the next few months the Pine Island Glacier will create an iceberg about 563 kilometers in area, and it will most likely float northward and melt as it moves. “Pine Island Glacier is losing ice very quickly, about six meters per year,” said Michael Studinger of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The flight center had sent an expedition called Operation Ice Bridge to Antarctica in October and had discovered the break in the ice. Satellites have been watching it since. “These things happen on a semi-regular basis in both the Arctic and Antarctic, but it's still a fairly large event,” said John Sonntag, the instrument team lead for Operation Ice Bridge. “So we wanted to make sure we captured as much of that process as we could. A lot of times when you're in science, you don't get to capture the big stories as they happen because you're not there at the right place at the right time. But this time we were.”
