83° 35' 56" N 36° 47' 32" W Fjord Gletcher. The northernmost calving glacier.

[Espen]

Breaking news:

Up in the extreme north of Greenland only about 50 km from Kap Morris Jesup is an officially unnamed glacier found, its terminus is above 83 North or in other words where the crows fly backwards.
This glacier which I named preliminary 83° 35' 56" N  36° 47' 32" W Fjord Gletcher, is the northernmost calving glacier in the world. The documentation is seen below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrud_Rask

Click on images to enlarge!

[A-Team]

This glacier which I named preliminary 83° 35' 56" N  36° 47' 32" W Fjord Gletcher, is the northernmost calving glacier in the world. The documentation is seen below.

Name is easy to remember?

Northernmost calving glacier -- there is evidence that it has calved lately?

Seems like the name could be pasted right into Landsat search. There could be very frequent coverage at this latitude (or none) but you might want images several months apart.

 83.59888º
-36.79222º

[Espen]

It is

This glacier which I named preliminary 83° 35' 56" N  36° 47' 32" W Fjord Gletcher, is the northernmost calving glacier in the world. The documentation is seen below.

Name is easy to remember?

Northernmost calving glacier -- there is evidence that it has calved lately?

Seems like the name could be pasted right into Landsat search. There could be very frequent coverage at this latitude (or none) but you might want images several months apart.

 83.59888º
-36.79222º

Yes the preliminary name is pretty easy to remember, but in short it is Treogfirsfjorden?

Not lately, but it did!

There is no Landsat coverage up there.

[Tor Bejnar]

Took me a minute but I get "Three-and-eighty-fjord".

Edit:  the 'system' didn't like the long subject title with the added "Re: ", so I had to remove the last letters.  Is there a way to shorten the original name?

[Espen]

Yes for some stupid reason the numbers in Danish is very similar to French, opposite the real Scandinavian countries (Sweden and Norway). Another good reason they are not real Scandinavians!

[A-Team]

There is no Landsat coverage up there.

They should delete LC80372452013137LGN01 Acquisition Date: 17-MAY-13 ???

[Espen]

There is no Landsat coverage up there.

They should delete LC80372452013137LGN01 Acquisition Date: 17-MAY-13

That image image is from when they aligned the satellite before it was officially opened?

There is one from Ward Hunt too same date 17 May 2013! 

[A-Team]

image is from when they aligned the satellite before it was officially opened?

Maybe during commissioning, before they nudged the orbit over to its present position?

If you can circle the area of interest for Treogfirsfjorden, I can post an enhanced 15 m resolution version corresponding to the relevant piece of this preview.

It seems Landsat-7 never came this way. So, in terms of calving vs being just an ice-filled embayment with no parent glacier, we would need to look elsewhere to establish calving from a calving front. Floating vs grounded ice shelf ... there won't be any bathymetry available here as sonar and airgrav have not come this way.

Tourism has mainly been to the east, people flying in to wade out to the northernmost little land islands.

[Espen]

Here it is, the small glacier to the east may be a few seconds further north, but I man not sure if it is an outlet glacier:

[A-Team]

Ok here is that region in the 12 May 2013 Landsat-8 at 15 m per pixel. Hmmm, interesting region.

[Espen]

No that is not the 83fjordsgletscher. That is Nordgletscher and not that north!

The 4th image is Treogfirs!

[A-Team]

These farther north are not calving?

[Espen]

These farther north are not calving?

The one to the right is 83!  and the 2 others are further "south"!

[A-Team]

We must tell NASA at once that they don't know which way is up.

UTM zone 25. Mercator. Latitude lines should be straight lines left to right.

Landsat says they are posting with north up.

[Espen]

We must tell NASA at once that they don't know which way is up.

UTM zone 25. Mercator. Latitude lines should be straight lines left to right.

Landsat says they are posting with north up.

Yes and I am using GEUS:

[A-Team]

We can agree to agree on changing this to the Nordgletscher forum?

It's a rather nicer glacier in my opinion (though same name is used for one way down in the southwest).

I went through all the projections at nullschool, 3 of them are shown below with a circle originating at the north pole and just touching the top of Greenland.

Here is Cape Morris Jesup satellite photo of an unknown date showing an active glacier. This is usually said to be the northernmost point in Greenland.

Assuming that satellite photo has north up, we see that the Landsat DOES NOT. I've rotated it by -7.11º in the third image to match it with the second photo. However a rotation alone does not put this image into Mercator projection like it is supposed to be.

[A-Team]

Below the area west of the northernmost point in Greenland (Cape Morris Jesup) is shown at 30 m resolution in the rotated 2013 Landsat. Click to expand -- it is a really nice image that will take up the full width of a large monitor.

The 2nd image shows 83fjordsgletscher at 5 m resolution. There are a lot of small blocks of ice in this picture being swept around the Fram so it is not certain where they originated.

The 3rd image shows a feature east of 83fjordsgletscher and even farther north. Is it a glacier or just a valley filled with snow; is it shedding ice (calving) or are those just rocks?

The 4th image shows one of several glaciers in this region that have retreated from the coast (due to lack of accumulation in this low snow region?) and now are 'calving' onto dry land in their old fjord. Its calving front at one time was at the coast just east of CMJ and (like Nordgletcher above) just to the north of 83fjordsgletscher.

[A-Team]

Here is another glacier with multiple small tributaries southeast of Cape Morris Jesup. It has retreated quite a ways from the coast and is spilling onto another even more depleted glacier in the lower right. Near its snout, it has pulled back from its northeast wall and so is crevassing towards it.

The second image shows some possible land north of Cape Morris Jesup in the Cape James Hill area. Or it might be small rocky islands at current sea level. Or it might not be north and simply reflect uncorrected distortion in this Landsat (which has been optimized to be level at CMJ. Needs a click to see at full width.

The area around Kaffeklubben Island has been visited repeated in recent years by explorers, for example see the map from http://jeffshea.org/greenland-stray-dog-west-expedition/

They did not have access to this 2013 Landsat. Eklipse might not in fact be the closest land to the North Pole ... here there may be a benefit to pan-sharpening the landsat to see islands better. However from the many shadows, there seem to be many ice heaves in the area on this May date.

The issues are discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/83-42 which errs in asserting 4 m tides occur here and that lichens could grow in salt water. A larger issue is scouring by the Arctic ice pack -- here an animation of annual movement out the Fram Strait would help delineate any protected area. There have never been any Cresis ice penetrating radar flights in the vicinity.

[Espen]

Here is another glacier with multiple small tributaries southeast of Cape Morris Jesup. It has retreated quite a ways from the coast and is spilling onto another even more depleted glacier in the lower right. Near its snout, it has pulled back from its northeast wall and so is crevassing towards it.

That glacier is named Siffs Gletscher:

[Espen]

"Calving onto dry land" Is part of the icecap at Mary Peary Tinder (peaks):

[A-Team]

Hmmm, LC80372452013137LGN01 is not in mercator UTM like all other known Landsat-8s. It seems like the known sun azimuth (almost due west) and shadows could be used, in conjunction with a good DEM, to determine local north but that does not prove all that practical. The second image displays the lat,lon corners provided in the metadata as a 'rectangle'.

This Landsat would make a good addition to Google Earth which is terrible in northern Greenland but I would guess they were unaware of it or it did not fit into their processing pipeline.

MAP_PROJECTION = "PS" [polar stereographic]
ELLIPSOID = "WGS84" [the usual]
VERTICAL_LON_FROM_POLE = 0.00000 [Greenwich virtual center line of image?]
TRUE_SCALE_LAT = 71.00000 [we're a long ways from that]
ORIENTATION = "NORTH_UP" [yeah but nowhere on image?]
ROLL_ANGLE = -11.706 [holy toledo!]
SUN_AZIMUTH = -100.9 [usually 180º]
SUN_ELEVATION = 20.9º [low for mid-May but consider high latitude]
TARGET_WRS_PATH = 37
TARGET_WRS_ROW = 880 [never to be heard from again]
DATE_ACQUIRED = 2013-05-17

[Espen]

This Landsat would make a good addition to Google Earth which is terrible in northern Greenland but I would guess they were unaware of it or it did not fit into their processing pipeline.

I did actually "complain" to them sometime ago, both the far north of Greenland and missing and recent high-resolution images of various glaciers:

[A-Team]

I did actually "complain" to them sometime ago, both the far north of Greenland and missing recent glaciers:

Is there some way for you to arrange for pizza delivery, thai restaurant, real estate sale, gypsy cab service, or 'like' button for this location? That would get their attention.

On Google Earth, I do get occasional notices that they have upgraded imagery. There is even a google site that shows the new photos locations on a globe. However new images are acquired at a glacial pace. It is weird in an area like Jakobshavn where the underlying imagery is a pastiche of multiple years with quality varying from terrible on the fjord to great inland.

At my house though, the tailgate of my subaru is clearly open and individual saguaro cactus can be measured from their shadow lengths. That's a lot better than Landsat.

However it seems like they could at least have 15 m Landsat everywhere by now. However they may be buying the whole photo database from a third party like WorldView or that map company they acquired.

USGS, they are just tying in to the Google Earth API, not doing anything on their own. Greenland mostly just needs 100-200 km in from the coast.

Ice penetrating radar, they are still using some awful satellite mosaic from the 1990's.

I saw a new open source mosaic for both Antarctica and Greenland. It is conceivable to import this as a Google Earth overlay, after reprojection to their coords. However it would be a huge slow-to-load file.

To replace the GE server with one serving this mosaic just-in-time as the fundamental image source, that would be a major project. I'm not sure that GE code is 'open source' to this extent.

Alternately, if we could just put EarthExplorer, Sentinel, and the radar tracks onto this polar stereographic mosaic, then GE would not be needed for Greenland or Antarctica. U Alaska Fairbanks has a dedicated polar portal going that may accomplish most of this. It would be a huge time saver vs using multiple sites not dedicated to cryosphere research.