With the onset of spring and warmer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, ice is melting and breaking up all along Canada’s Labrador Coast. In this true-color scene, acquired on May 28, 2002, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), the snow- and ice-covered coastline is clearly visible, outlined by Newfoundland’s many inlets and rugged terrain. Just offshore, the sea ice appears as a softer bluish-white; the criss-crossing lines are stress fractures as the ice breaks up into large chunks.
The white swirls visible farther out to sea are comprised of crushed ice where the Labrador icepack has been ground up into finer floes, comprised of chunks on the order of a few metres across. The wind and water currents organize these floes into bands that get carried out to sea. From space, these bands of small floes look like wispy filaments—not so to a ship on the surface trying to navigate through them. These ice floes can be hazardous to maritime vessels traveling along the Labrador Coast.
Image courtesy Liam Gumley, Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
