{"id":130229,"date":"2025-09-11T15:46:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/130229\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T15:46:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T15:46:11","slug":"nasa-satellite-images-reveal-new-island-in-alaska-formed-by-decades-of-glacial-retreat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/130229\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Satellite Images Reveal New Island In Alaska Formed By Decades Of Glacial Retreat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Global warming is a tricksy beast. In some places, it\u2019s transforming<\/a> once-lush environments into barren deserts<\/a>; in others, it\u2019s doing essentially the opposite<\/a> \u2013 albeit through an irony-fueled, monkey\u2019s paw kind of interpretation of \u201cre-green the Earth\u2019s deserts<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, a new set of photos from NASA has laid bare a striking example of the latter effect \u2013 and it\u2019s right on our doorstep. Alaska, it turns out, has a new island \u2013 not thanks to new land rising up through the seas, but because of glacial melt so dramatic that it has surrounded a piece of land previously connected to the mainland.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlong the coastal plain of southeastern Alaska, water is rapidly replacing ice,\u201d NASA announced<\/a> in an Earth Observatory Image of the Day post this week. \u201cGlaciers in this area are thinning and retreating, with meltwater forming proglacial lakes off their fronts. In one of these growing watery expanses, a new island has emerged.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Alsek Glacier once encircled a small mountain known as Prow Knob near its terminus,\u201d they explain. \u201cIn summer 2025, the glacier lost contact with Prow Knob, leaving the approximately 2-square-mile (5-square-kilometer) landmass surrounded by the water of Alsek Lake.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The melting of the Alsek Glacier happened slowly, until it didn\u2019t. In 1894 \u2013 the earliest observations of the glacier on record \u2013 the ice basically covered what\u2019s now Alsek Lake; reports from 1907 described it as being \u201canchored to a nunatak,\u201d according to a US Geological Survey review from 2005<\/a> \u2013 the term refers to a rocky island surrounded by flowing glacier ice rather than water \u2013 with an iceface \u201cas much as 50 m[eters, 164 feet] high.\u201d<\/p>\n

But \u201cby 1948, the glacier had retreated 1.5 to 2.5 km,\u201d the survey continues. \u201cBy 25 August 1960, retreat was as much as 5 km.\u201d By the late 1970s, the glacier, now much reduced in size and reach, seemed like it was about to separate into two ice tongues; two decades later, it had done precisely that, and \u201cby 2003, the terminus separated into three distinct ice tongues,\u201d the authors write.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/p>\n

Wuh-oh.<\/p>\n

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey<\/p>\n

All of these changes can be seen in the images published this week by NASA \u2013 but it\u2019s the most recent couple, from 2018 and 2025, which are most striking. In the space of just seven years \u2013 a short enough time that you probably think of yourself as not having aged at all throughout it \u2013 Alsek Lake has grown from abutting most of Prow Knob to entirely surrounding it.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the ice has retreated, melting into the lake and calving away from itself as soaring temperatures make it warmer and less stable. It\u2019s a trend that\u2019s likely to continue, NASA warns \u2013 and one that\u2019s becoming all too familiar in the once-icy Arctic state. Along with the Yakutat and Grand Plateau Glaciers, the melting of Alsek has resulted in lakes almost double the sizes they once were<\/a> \u2013 not in times long past, but within living memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe lakes that are forming in this region are immense,\u201d Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, told NASA in November last year<\/a>. \u201cStarting at the mountains and spreading toward the coast,\u201d the waters coming from these melting glaciers likely represent the fastest lake growth in the US this century, he believes.<\/p>\n

Alaska now is \u201ca new lake district,\u201d he said. \u201c[One] that is unique in our nation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Global warming is a tricksy beast. In some places, it\u2019s transforming once-lush environments into barren deserts; in others,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-130229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}