Greenland’s Humboldt Glacier exposes layers of ice from ancient climate periods

A handout photo made available by NASA shows an aerial view of a lake bounded to the left by Washington Land, a deglaciated peninsula that juts into the Kane Basin, and at right by the Humboldt Glacier, Greenland’s widest marine-terminating glacier on the  4 September 2019 (issued 28 September 2019).

The image was taken by John Sonntag, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during an airborne campaign for NASA’s Operation IceBridge.

The flight was one of 11 flown in September 2019 on NASA’s Gulfstream-V to measure summer melting on Greenland.

The measurements will be compared to those collected during the IceBridge campaign in spring 2019, and with measurements from the new Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), which launched one year ago.

Photo: EPA-EFE/JOHN SONNTAG/OPERATION ICEBRIDGE/NASA HANDOUT