News & Current Events
NASA Warns Public After Sudden Formation Of Island In Alaska
A brand-new island has emerged, prompting NASA to deliver a stark warning about the threat posed by climate change.
A melting glacier along the coastal plain of southeast Alaska has created an ever-increasing lake around a strip of land, as seen by NASA satellites over the course of four decades.
In fact, as of this year, the area is now regarded as a single island.
The two-square-mile region is home to Prow Knob, a small mountain that was formerly encircled by the Alsek Glacier, a frozen body of water.
However, when the glacier softened and thinned, meltwater created “proglacial lakes”—the discharge of meltwater into the glacier basin—and gradually occupied the area.
According to NASA, as of this summer, Prow Knob is formally a land mass that is isolated from the expanding Alsek Lake.
With rising temperatures causing glaciers to melt and coasts all over the world to shift, it is believed that the change is just another example of how climate change is having an impact.
Prow Knob was initially photographed by the Landsat 5 satellite in July 1984, when the western edge of the peak touched the lakeside, with the remainder of the mountain covered by the glacier’s mass of ice.
The satellite has tracked the status and the gradual melting of the southern Grand Plateau Glacier and the Alsek Glacier for the past 40 years.
As they did so, the lake grew and began to fill the gap, then slowly ate up the ice that surrounded the mountain.
This summer, the final piece of ice was observed melting due to the issue, leaving Prow Knob as a single island.
According to NASA, the split occurred somewhere between July 13 and August 6.
According to the space agency, the Alsek Glacier ended at Gateway Knob, about three miles west of Prow Knob, in the early 20th century.
Even though the ice began to move eastward by the middle of the century, Prow Knob was still covered by it. The late glaciologist Austin Post named the landmark because it resembled the prow of a ship.
However, by 1984, the shoreline had replaced its perimeter, and by 1999, both glaciers had begun to recede.
Since then, Alsek Lake has grown from 45 square kilometers to 75 square kilometers, almost doubling in size.
Now that the ice has formally separated from the mountain, NASA warns that more melting is likely to occur in the upcoming years.
The ‘ice is less stable and more prone to calving’ since the glacier has ‘lost contact’ with Prow Knob, it states.
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