This stunning satellite image shows a trio of barren islands in the Russian Arctic, offering a rare look at the region's colorful, concentric rings of ever-present ice caps.
The Severnaya Zemlya archipelago is a collection of Russian-owned islands in the Arctic Ocean covering about 14,300 square miles (37,000 square kilometers) — about the same size as Maryland — off the northernmost coastline of Siberia. The archipelago is located along the border between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea and has four main land masses: Komsomolets Island, Pioneer Island, October Revolution Island and Bolshevik Island.
The region was only discovered in 1913 and wasn't properly visited until decades later, making it one of the largest archipelagos on Earth to be properly mapped, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
This photo shows the intersection between Komsomolets Island (center), Pioneer Island (left), and October Revolution Island (right), which are separated by only a few miles of ocean, according to NASA Earth Observatory.
For most of the year, these islands are mostly covered by ice and snow and are connected to each other by thick sea ice. But for about two months each summer, temperatures creep above freezing, allowing some of the frozen water to melt, which exposes the barren landscape below. The only things that live there are lichens and a few bushes.
The thickest and oldest ice remains during the summer months, in the form of glaciers and hill-shaped ice caps that cover about half of the archipelago's surface.
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The ice caps, which can reach up to 250 meters in height, are made up of multi-year ice, meaning that additional layers of snow are compacted onto their icy peaks each winter, while also losing ice from summer melt. When viewed from above, this cycle of melting and freezing creates the striking concentric rings of color seen in this image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
The Severnaya Zemlya archipelago is also home to Russia's largest glacier, the Academy of Sciences Glacier, which is located north of the photographed ice cap on Komsomolets Island. This giant mass of ice covers approximately 2,150 square miles (5,570 sq km), which is about two-thirds of the island's area.
However, the archipelago's year-round ice is slowly disappearing thanks to human causes climate change. or 2023 study found that between 1965 and 2021, the region's glaciers shrank by about 5%, with a similar decrease projected for surrounding ice caps.
This rate of ice loss is likely to increase in the future as Projected warming is taking us past irreversible tipping points.
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