Hundreds of ice floes, small and large, are visible as white grit floating on the dirty gray waters of Geikie Lake at the base of Chile’s Tyndall Glacier. The photo was taken on May 10 by an astronaut aboard the Space Station and clearly shows the rapid melting rate of the glaciers of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world’s third largest ice sheet after Antarctica and Greenland. The glacier tongue casts a long shadow on the lake. Based on the position of the sun, you can determine that the steep edge towers thirty to forty meters above the lake.
The photo was taken in the autumn of the Southern Hemisphere, when melting is most rapid. The crackle of the glacier tongue shows that more calving will occur in the foreseeable future. The Geikie Glacier Lake was created around 1940 and has grown considerably since then. The lake is 200 meters deep in the middle.
The melting of the glacier is accelerating due to climate change. Glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, told NASA that the Tyndall Glacier’s ice tongue has shortened by more than two kilometers since November 2022. Extremely large chunks of ice broke off in March and April 2023. On satellite images from the Sentinel satellite it can be seen that three large icebergs then broke loose.
A rock wall has been exposed along the melting glacier in which dozens of fossils of ichthyosaurs from the early Cretaceous have been discovered. During an expedition in March and April 2022scientists secured ‘Fiona’, a completely fossilized skeleton of a four-meter-long female ichthyosaur with multiple embryos. The fossil of this marine reptile, between 129 and 139 million years old, was discovered in 2009 by Judith Pardo-Pérez of the University of Magallanes.