Saunders Island, Greenland CoastThis gorgeous image is of an island called Saunders island off the n

Saunders Island, Greenland CoastThis gorgeous image is of an island called Saunders island off the northwest coast of Greenland, north of Baffin Bay and Baffin Island in Canada. This image was taken from a fixed-wing plane flown by NASA’s “Icebridge” program, a nearly decade long campaign of aerial reconnaissance over the planet’s icecaps to monitor their condition as the world warms.A number of cool details are apparent in this photo. The water surrounding the island at the center is called Wolstenholme Fjord, and is adjacent to a larger body of water known as North Star Bay. This Fjord is a location that “drains” a substantial portion of northern Greenland; at least 4 large glaciers currently empty into this fjord.Look closely at the sea ice and you’ll see several different “colors”. Some areas are bright, some areas are dimmer. The color of the ice is reflecting its thickness. When ice endures the summer melt season for several years, it thickens during the winter and reflects more light. Ice that just formed over the previous winter is thinner and reflects less light. There are probably 3 or 4 different thicknesses of ice visible in this image. Finally, there is some open water visible in the foreground as well.At the top of this image you can barely make out the coastline of Greenland; a piece of land known as Kap Atholl. This area lies to the north of Thule air base and has something of a remarkable history. In January of 1968, an American B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in this area. The nuclear material in the bombs did not detonate, but some of the conventional explosives in the bombs did explode during the impact.This explosion scattered the nuclear material throughout this area. Some of it was cleaned up, but cleaning up nuclear material from an ice cap isn’t the easiest task in the world, so there is probably still some amount of radioactive material left in this environment from that crash decades ago.-JBBImage credit: NASA/Icebridge/Michael Studingerhttp://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/multimedia/spr13/DSC6398_SaundersIsland.jpg.htmlThule Incident:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crashWolstenholme Fjordhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolstenholme_FjordKap Atholl Map:http://mapcarta.com/20008708 -- source link

More pics about