NASA has released a mesmerizing image of a heart-shaped formation created by the calving of a glacier in northwest Greenland.
The image was captured by NASA's Operation IceBridge aerial survey on March 27, 2017. A stunning calving in the Arctic, which appears to be a broken heart, can be seen in the image which the space agency revealed on the occasion of Valentine's Day.
Operation IceBridge is a 2009-2018 NASA mission that monitors the condition of polar ice from an aircraft.
Seven field campaigns in the Arctic and Antarctic were carried out by IceBridge in a single year in the mission's nine-year history, a NASA statement revealed.
The researchers flew more than 214,000 miles (344399.7 kilometers) to analyze the changes in the height of the polar ice. The distance covered by the researchers is equal to orbiting the Earth 8.6 times at the equator.
The beautiful picture shows a heart-shaped outline of the glacier along with flowing waves through the ice and snow. Also, a crack can be seen in the layer of snow and ice in the middle of the heart shape.
This image is considered to be one of the most spectacular images captured by the IceBridge aerial survey.
Another image was previously captured by the Operation IceBridge on November 29, 2017, during its flight to Victoria Land. The stunning image showed an iceberg floating in Antarctica's McMurdo Sound.
The image showed a submerged part of an iceberg surrounded by a strange glowing blue halo, which made the ice appear the bluest. The IceBridge survey has completed five polar campaigns this year and ended its Antarctic Survey earlier this week.
"The undersides of some icebergs can be eroded away, exposing older, denser, and incredibly blue ice. Erosion can change an iceberg's shape and cause it to flip, bringing the sculpted blue ice above the water's surface," a NASA statement said.
"The unique step-like shape of this berg—compared to the tabular and more stable berg in the top-right of the image—suggests that it likely rotated sometime after calving," the statement added.
