Part of the icy landscape of the Northeast Greenland National Park is pictured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
Zoom in to explore this image at its full 10 m resolution.
Lying in the North Atlantic Ocean, Greenland is the world’s largest island and is home to the Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest national park in the world. The park covers 972 000 sq km – which is almost the area of Spain and France combined – with about 80% of its territory permanently under the mighty Greenland Ice Sheet, the world’s second largest ice sheet after Antarctica.
In this summer image, the colour of soil varies from light to dark brown, ice and snow appear in shades of white, while the different blue tones indicate water.
The large blue area on the right is Dove Bay, which appears partly free from ice, with seasonal breakup fractures due to currents and wind.
North of the bay, on the southern shore of the Germania Land Peninsula, visible in the top right corner, lies the Danmarkshavn weather station, where the permanent six-man team collects meteorological data used in international weather forecasting models. Danmarkshavn is one of the most isolated inhabited stations in the world. It is also known as the northernmost place on Greenland’s east coast accessible to non-icebreaking vessels, depending on ice conditions.
A number of glaciers and their ice streams are pictured with melt ponds visible as blue spots in the ice, especially zooming in near the centre of the image. Melt ponds are vast pools of open water that form on both sea ice and ice sheets during spring and summer, as the air warms up and the sun beats down on the Greenland Ice Sheet. When snow and ice melt on the surface of glaciers, water flows in channels and streams and collects in depressions on the surface, forming the ponds.
Melt ponds can speed up the melting of ice by reducing its ability to reflect sunlight, which increases heat absorption and further accelerates ice melt. While the melting of sea ice does not directly affect global sea levels, the faster melting of land-based ice, enhanced by these processes, does contribute to sea level rise.
Rising sea levels increase the risk of flooding in coastal areas worldwide, impact Arctic Ocean marine ecosystems, and alter ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns – which affect weather conditions around the planet.
Satellite imagery is vital to mapping the rapidly changing face of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Observations from space can be used to verify how climate models simulate ice sheet melting which will allow improved predictions of how much Greenland will raise the global sea level in the future.