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IMAGE CAPTION                   
					Antarctic Peninsula
					February 20 , 2001

The Antarctica Peninsula is the furthest north extension of the 
Antarctic continent and is exposed to slightly warmer climate 
conditions than the greater continent. This mosaic from the 2000 
Antarctic Mapping Mission shows most of the peninsula. The blue 
line is the coastline seen in the 1997 Antarctic Mapping Mission. 
The broad Larsen Ice Shelf lies to the east, extending into the 
Weddell Sea, and smaller ice shelves including the Wordie and 
George VI are in the southwest corner.  

The northern Larsen Shelf has been retreating since the 1960s, 
with major collapses in the 1990s. Warming in both the air and 
ocean underlying the ice shelves leads to increased fracturing 
and eventually calving of the ice shelf fronts into icebergs. The 
1995 Larsen calving events were due to anomalously warm summer 
temperatures in the early 1990s.  The warming noted in the 
Antarctica Peninsula, as measured from several research stations 
located there, is not sufficient to affect the thicker and more 
extensive West Antarctic ice shelves to the south on the main 
continent. 

The two RADARSAT mosaics from 1997 and 2000 Antarctic imaging 
campaigns provide highly accurate snapshots of this rapidly 
changing region of the greater Antarctic continent.  

The Antarctic Mapping Mission is a joint project between NASA and 
the Canadian Space Agency. The project is led by Ohio State 
University in Columbus in partnership with the Alaska Synthetic 
Aperture Radar (SAR) Facility at the University of Alaska 
Fairbanks, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., 
and the Vexcel Corporation, Boulder, Colo. The Canadian Space 
Agency's RADARSAT-1 satellite carries a synthetic aperture radar, 
an imaging radar sensor that operates at C-band (5.3 GHz 
frequency) with horizontal transmit-horizontal receive 
polarization from an orbital altitude of about 800 kilometers 
(500 miles. The 1997 Antarctic Mapping Mission took place between 
Sept. 19 and Oct. 14 and mapped the entire Antarctic continent. 
The 2000 Antarctic Mapping Mission lasted from Sept. 3 to  Nov. 4 
and obtained complete coverage of Antarctica north of 82 degrees 
south latitude.  

Photo Credit: Canadian Space Agency/NASA/Ohio State University, 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Alaska SAR Facility
 
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