Fragments of ice splintered from a glacier float down an Antarctic lake in a photo captured from aboard the International Space Station.

What is it?

In a new photograph snapped by astronauts on the International Space Station, you can see pieces of the Tyndall Glacier splintering off and floating out into the lake Lago Geikie. Even from space, the chunks of ice falling from the glacier can be seen floating away.

The Tyndall Glacier in southern Chile is part of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. Located between Chile and Argentina, this is the second-largest continuous ice field like it in the world. It measures at over 5,000 square miles of ice (13,000 square kilometers).

It is the larger half of two remaining pieces of the Patagonian Ice Sheet, an almost unbelievably massive sheet of ice that covered southern Chile during the last glacial period over 20,000 years ago.

Why is it incredible?

As of 2025, the worlds glaciers have lost over 300 tons (273 tonnes) of ice in just the last 20 years alone. With the progression of climate change, this ice continues to melt, fragment and contribute to rising sea levels around the globe. And in this image, we can see the process with our own eyes.

The Tyndall Glacier has been shrinking for about 150 years; as more and more pieces of this glacier break off or melt, Lago Geikie continues to grow and expand. In the past four years alone, Tyndall has lost 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) in length, according to glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nicholas College. Interestingly, while glacier shrinking is concerning as it contributes to sea level rise which puts coastal communities in serious danger, this glacial retreat revealed some unexpected findings beyond that. As this glacier has fallen away, it has exposed bedrock where scientists have found ichthyosaur fossils.

For decades, satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth have provided scientists with a crucial vantage point to monitor our planet's frozen landscapes. Missions like NASA's Landsat and the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel are particularly valuable for studying glaciers, vast dynamic rivers of ice that are sensitive to changes in temperature and precipitation.

What is it?

In a recent image released by the European Space Agency, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite captured an image of Chile's Laguna San Rafael National Park. Spanning approximately 10,500 square miles (17,000 square km), the park lies along Chile's Pacific coast and in the Patagonian region. Its ice fields feed into 28 outlet glaciers, including the two largest glaciers seen in the image: San Rafael and San Quintin.

Where is it?

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite is located around 477 miles (768 km) above Earth.

Why is it amazing?

Along with this recently taken image, the European Space Agency produced a similar image for comparison, taken in February 1987. Looking at the two satellite images, it's easy to see the retreat of the glaciers over time, as the Earth's climate continues to change.

The glaciers' retreats have changed the landscape significantly, widening lakes and producing new bodies of water, proglacial lakes, a growing pool of meltwater. Simultaneously, their shrinking contributes directly to rising sea levels, one of the most profound and far-reaching consequences of climate change.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about glacier melting and global warming.

NASA satellite imagery has revealed a new island off Alaska's coast that emerged after long-standing glacial ice melted, isolating a small mountain that was once part of the mainland.

The island sits in Alsek Lake, where the Alsek Glacier has been steadily thinning and flooding the region with meltwater. Two Landsat images — captured on July 5, 1984 by the TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 5 and on Aug. 6, 2025 by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 — show the transformation in striking detail, according to a statement from NASA.

Alsek Glacier once wrapped around a small mountain known as Prow Knob. Over the past four decades, both arms of the glacier have retreated more than 3 miles (5 kilometers), carving out a proglacial lake in the process. The recent imagery confirms the glacier has now completely separated from Prow Knob, which is surrounded by water and officially an island, according to the statement.

Glaciologists have been monitoring Alsek Glacier for decades. In the early 20th century, the glacier is believed to have terminated at Gateway Knob, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) west of Prow Knob on the opposite side of what is now Alsek Lake. Since then, the glacier has continued its steady retreat, with satellite data tracking its transformation.

The retreating glacier has fueled massive lake expansion. Alsek Lake has grown from roughly 17 square miles (45 square km) in 1984 to about 29 square miles (75 km²) today. Its growth is fed not only by Alsek Glacier's meltwater but also by nearby proglacial lakes such as Harlequin and Grand Plateau. In fact, Alsek Glacier remained connected with the northern arm of the Grand Plateau Glacier until around 1999, when both ice masses had receded further, creating a major branch of Alsek Lake seen in later satellite images.

The newly emerged island measures about 2 square miles (or 5 square km). Based on satellite imagery, scientists believe it formed sometime between July 13 and Aug. 6, 2025. With the separation of Prow Knob, the glacier is now less stable and more prone to calving, when large chunks of ice break off into the lake, according to the statement.

The emergence of this island reflects the accelerating pace of glacial retreat in Southeast Alaska and its ability to reshape landscapes within decades. Expanding lakes, unstable ice fronts and newly exposed terrain point to significant shifts underway, with researchers warning that continued ice loss in a warming world could alter the region's hydrology and ecosystems.

Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is melting fast; this much, scientists already know. However,  according to a new study, it's melting faster than we thought — and that spells trouble for sea-level-rise projections.

Using observations from the ICEYE Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite constellation, a joint project between the U.S. and Finland, researchers have taken a detailed look beneath the Thwaites Glacier for the first time, specifically at an area called the grounding line. This is where a tidewater glacier (that is, one that flows into the ocean) transitions from being anchored to land to floating on the sea. Here, physical processes contribute to a tidewater glacier's ice mass loss, which is why it's crucial to study this boundary. 

The researchers discovered that the grounding line wasn't an abrupt transition as expected. Instead, Thwaites Glacier has a tidally controlled grounding zone stretching between 1.2 and 3.7 miles (2 kilometers to 6 kilometers) wide, with warm seawater intrusions reaching a further 3.7 miles (6 km) inland during spring tide. This widespread contact between relatively warm seawater and the glacier "will induce vigorous melt of grounded ice over kilometers, making the glacier more vulnerable to ocean warming," according to the study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that means it's melting faster than our current models have predicted.

Related: Doomsday Glacier melting in Antarctica means terrible news for global sea level rise

"Until now, some of the most dynamic processes in nature have been impossible to observe with sufficient detail or frequency to allow us to understand and model them," ICEYE Director of Analytics Michael Wollersheim said in a statement. "Observing these processes from space and using radar satellite images, which provide centimeter-level precision InSAR measurements at daily frequency, marks a significant leap forward."

This research at Thwaites Glacier provides scientists the opportunity to revise their models to create a more accurate prediction of glacial melt — and therefore global sea level rise — around the world. “If we put this type of ocean-ice interaction into ice sheet models, I expect we will be able to do a much better job of reproducing what has happened in the past quarter century, which will lead to a higher level of confidence in our projections,” said Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine professor of Earth system science and senior project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Unfortunately, those projections will likely become more dire. Thwaites Glacier is commonly referred to as the "doomsday glacier" for its potential impact on sea level rise — it's the most unstable glacier in Antarctica, and its ice mass loss could add two feet (60 centimeters) to current sea levels.

"At the moment we don't have enough information to say one way or the other how much time there is before the oceanwater intrusion is irreversible," said Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "By improving the models and focusing our research on these critical glaciers, we will try to get these numbers at least pinned down for decades versus centuries."

Yesterday (Sept. 25), a stark new climate report came out that showed climate change is progressing much faster than anticipated, but it's not too late for humans to make changes.

The report, written and released by the United Nations-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and formally known as the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, details the most up-to-date understanding of climate change, its causes, how it will continue to impact us on Earth and what we can do about it. The report looks to 2100 to see both where we will be if we continue on as we currently are, or if major changes are made to mitigate contributing factors like carbon dioxide emissions.

The main takeaway from the report? "We're seeing that climate change impacts are already happening, were seeing that they're happening at a faster pace than before," Ben Orlove, a professor of public policy at Columbia University and a lead author on the report, said to Space.com at an Explorer's Club event in New York on Sept. 25, where scientists, including authors of the report, discussed the report and its implications.

Related: The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted

This harsh reality is "true in the oceans, sea levels are rising, the oceans are turning more acid[ic], they're losing the oxygen that's required to support life. We're seeing glaciers melting on every continent of the world. Antarctica and Greenland [are] also losing their ice. These are serious problems," Orlove added. "We've been able to look ahead to 2100 and to distinguish what happens if we cut back on greenhouse gases soon or if we do not. And there's an enormous difference. It'd be much easier to cope with the changes that will come by 2100 if they're smaller."

"This report is built on the science we need to guide us in adapting to a changing environment and, most importantly, to avert a planetary disaster … The findings of the new IPCC report need to be known and not only known but understood by me and all of my colleagues in government and politics around the world," Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the prime minister of Iceland, said at the event. 

The report was clear in showing how, if we continue behaving in a "business-as-usual" fashion, climate change and its consequences will continue to grow to unprecedented extremes. "The report does not prescribe telling anyone what to do. But we can show the consequences of those actions," Orlove said.

Tropical storms becoming both more severe and more frequent will be just one of many realities that we will face. It is apparent in the report that, seeing as we are already experiencing the consequences of climate change, there is no way to avoid its effects.

Hope?

However, while this might seem like a "doomsday" report to some, the authors were surprisingly optimistic in showing that, while the details of progressing climate change are sobering, we can do something about it. In the report, there is a figure, pictured above, which shows graphs with a red line and a blue line. 

The red line shows the progression of climate change if we don't change anything, and it goes sharply up in all cases (except for ocean acidification because in that graph the pH is dropping). But the blue line is where there is hope. This line, which doesn't increase sharply and instead looks almost straight, shows what will happen is we make major changes to human activity as it relates to climate change. 

"You don't turn the ice sheets around in decades or even centuries. But you can see it's a much, much rosier picture with perhaps less than a meter of sea level rise even centuries out into the future, and that's something that I think we can all probably deal with and tolerate," Robert DeCanto, a lead author on the polar regions chapter of the report, said about the possibility to change our future with dramatic mitigation of human activity affecting climate change. 

So, while this report is a sobering reminder that we are causing climate change, which will continue to threaten and take human lives around the world, the report's authors say we can do something about it. 

"There are things that people can do in their homes, in their communities, in their countries and around the globe. At the personal level there are steps we can take to decarbonize our own personal lives. We can eat less meat, we can take public transportation. These are not choices that we're imposing," Orlove said. He explained that the report does not tell anyone what to do but, rather, outlines how policymakers and all of us at home have the power to affect our future in one way or another. 

Space and climate change 

This report and climate research goes hand in hand with activities performed in space. While efforts to launch satellites, experiments and humans into space are often seen as separate from the issues we face on Earth, they are intrinsically linked.

"Space-based research is fundamental. In the high mountain chapter, were able to trace changes in glaciers because satellites can actually measure the weight of glaciers," Orlove said, referencing space-based research used for this special report. "The tiny variations in the Earth's gravitational field that are caused as water's transferred from glaciers to oceans, it can be registered by satellites," he added.

Aspects of climate change that might not seem as readily apparent are also observed and studied using space-based data. For example, animal herding in the mountains. "Indigenous communities high in the Andes and in the Himalayas have long traditions of herding animals. We're able to trace the changes in the pastures due to glacier retreat because the satellites offer us such precise images that we can observe the meadows as they shrink," Orlove said.

"We can see all of that from space! [It's] fundamental to support it [climate change research] and what a wonderful model of international cooperation," he added.

• 6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change
• 5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Your Health
• Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Glaciers

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Humans are responsible for some of the wobble in Earth's spin.

Since 1899, the Earth's axis of spin has shifted about 34 feet (10.5 meters). Now, research quantifies the reasons why and finds that a third is due to melting ice and rising sea levels, particularly in Greenland — placing the blame on the doorstep of anthropogenic climate change.

Another third of the wobble is due to land masses expanding upward as the glaciers retreat and lighten their load. The final portion is the fault of the slow churn of the mantle, the viscous middle layer of the planet.

"We have provided evidence for more than one single process that is the key driver" for altering the Earth's axis, said Surendra Adhikari, an Earth system scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a lead researcher on the new study. [Why Does the Earth Rotate?]

Wobbly Earth

Scientists have long known that the distribution of mass around the Earth determines its spin, much like how the shape and weight distribution of a spinning top determines how it moves. Also, Earth's spin isn't perfectly even, as scientists know thanks to slight wiggles in the movements of the stars across the night sky that have been recorded for thousands of years, said Erik Ivins, a study co-author and a senior research scientist at JPL. Since the 1990s, space-based measurements have also confirmed that the Earth's axis of rotation drifts by a few centimeters a year, generally toward Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada.  

Researchers knew that a proportion of this wobble was caused by glacial isostatic adjustment, an ongoing process since the end of the last ice age 16,000 years ago. As the glaciers retreat, they relieve the land underneath of their mass. Gradually, over thousands of years, the land responds to this relief by rising like bread dough. (In some places on the edges of the ancient ice sheets, the land might also collapse because the ice had forced it to bulge upward.)

But in the new research, published in the November issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Adhikari and his colleagues found that glacial isostatic adjustment was only responsible for about 1.3 inches (3.5 centimeters) of axis wobble per year. That was only about a third of the wobble — 4 inches (10.5 cm) — observed each year over the 20th century.

To fill in the gap, the research team built a computer model of the physics of Earth's spin, feeding in data about changes in the balance of land-based ice and ocean waters over the 20th century. The researchers also accounted for other shifts in land and water, such as groundwater depletion and the building of artificial reservoirs, all part of humanity's terraforming of the planet. [What in the World Would Happen If Earth Were to Spin Backward?]

The results revealed that these environmental processes cause another 1.7 inches (4.3 cm) of wobble each year. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet was a particularly important contributor, the researchers found. That's because Greenland has released a large amount of water that was once locked up on land into the oceans, where its mass has been redistributed, Ivins told Live Science. Mountain glaciers and small ice caps elsewhere have also contributed to sea-level rise, he said; but they aren't as concentrated, and their effects on the Earth's rotation often cancel each other out.

Core considerations

The glaciers and the ice melt still left a third of the wobble unaccounted for, so Adhikari and his team looked inward. The Earth's mantle is not static, he said, but moves by the process of convection: Hotter material from closer to the core rises and cooler material sinks in a cycle of vertical motion. By including convection in the model of Earth's wobble, the researchers had accounted for the last third of the changes in the spin over the 20th century.

It's important to realize that this wobble isn't the prelude to any sort of environmental calamity, Ivins and Adhikari said. It doesn't affect agriculture or climate in and of itself, and any small impact on navigational equipment is easy to correct for.

"The amount [of drift] is not a huge amount," Adhikari said.

But it does give scientists a way to figure out where Earth's mass is and where it's going. For example, Adhikari said, Greenland's melt has become an increasingly large contributor to changing the axis location in the past 15 years, which is pushing the drift eastward.

"That fact is important for climate scientists," Ivins said, "because they can understand, in a global sense, which are the most important mass transports that are going on today."

The JPL website hosts a simulation of the polar wobble and its contributing factors.

Original article on Live Science.