Animation 13: Greenland east coast

With cloudiness on the increase again in the Arctic, what with all those cyclones moving in over Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago, I decided to take the opportunity to make an overview of Greenland's east coast, where - after the breaking off and disintegration of the ice island approximately the size of Corsica (see animation) - the landfast ice has continued to break off:

 

Last week I made a short animation for comparison with the situation in 2009 around this date and at the end of the melting season:

I wonder how much more of that ice will be gone after this year and what the effect on the Zachariae and 79N Glaciers behind it will be.

UPDATE: In the comment section Mauri Pelto pushed me to do some more comparative research, and what else can one do but obey?

I dived into the MODIS archives and came up with this image from September 9th 2008:

 

So it looks like this is a recurring thing. But there's still two weeks till September 9th, so let's see how much 'worse' it can get.

UPDATE 2: However much I dislike wading through the MODIS archives, I still went to look if I could find something from 2007. This is an image from a few days back in that year, August 21st 2007, as there are no MODIS images for September 2007:

 

That looks pretty solid to me, though. Did something change in 2008?

UPDATE 3: No, it didn't. I'm looking at some images from other years and see the same thing. It looks spectacular, but is not irregular.

Comments

[Lord Soth]

If you take a close look at this sea ice; the outside area looks like multiyear ice while the inside towards the glacier is first year ice. It looks like the inside area is cracking and is going to shear along a north south line where the open water is in the center of the mass. This will send the multiyear ice adrift.

[Glacierchange.wordpress.com]

The Zachariae Glacier does not have a large floating section like the Petermann nor is it nearly as rapidly moving as the Jakobshavn. Thus, the impact of a late season sea ice loss that seems more limited than 2007 or 2008 is likely to be incremental if any. The northern section of the terminus that emerges from the confining outlet fjord is certainly the vulnerable part.

[Neven]

Mauri (nice to see you back), do you mean to imply that more or all of that landfast ice was gone in 2007 and 2008 around this time of the year? I thought most of it, especially near the coast, had been there for many, many years.

[Glacierchange.wordpress.com]

The MODIS imagery of the ice front area from the Byrd Polar RC indicate to me a bit less sea ice in 2007 and 2008, maybe a comparative animation of yours would allow better comparison. The Operation Ice Bridge footage is also nice of the ice bergs near the glacier. The glacier has a bedrock rise at the end of the floating tongue which is not that thick. The floating section is 10-20 km long depending upon whether you measure from the southern or northern edge of the terminus. Beyond that rise the bed extends below sea level for another 100 km inland. The glacier in the northeast that has a particularly long deep uninterrrupted low basal elevation is the Storstrømmen

[Glacierchange.wordpress.com]

Neven I have been working on a bit of Petermann Glacier material today. The annotations for the images identify supraglacial stream channels the spread of the rift that I labelled as Rift C in 2008 in the 2009 blog update to the 2008 RC article.

[Neven]

Mauri, thanks a lot for your explanation and links. I'll see if I can find images of 2007 and 2008 to compare, although I really dislike searching the MODIS database.

[Neven]

I had a look after all (see updates). In 2007 things look pretty solid. 2008 looks just as bad, if not worse.

[Lord Soth]

I was right on the money. The 79N NE Greenland sea ice has shattered down the North/South line between the first year ice close to the Glacier and the 2nd year ice that did not melt in 2009 on the outside. In two weeks it will look like 2008.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c03.2010238.terra.250m