Greenland   07/13/07

Summer thaw was underway on the fringe of eastern Greenland when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and captured this image on July 13, 2007. Inland (left), snow and ice make a white blanket, while closer to sea (center and right) the annual snow has retreated from much of the rocky coastline and from the surface of some glaciers, which appear slightly gray. In the fjords, meltwater carrying finely ground sediment, crushed by the movement of glaciers over rock, colors the water turquoise. Sea ice (right) had fractured into geometric blocks, and small chunks of ice are scattered in some fjords like confetti.

Text and image courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory.