Antarctic Peninsula

This Envisat image features the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches beyond the Antarctic Circle to within 1050 km to the southern tip of South America. The 1000-km-long arm of the mountainous peninsula is situated between the Bellingshausen Sea on the west and the Weddell Sea on the east. Along the peninsula, ice shelves are nourished by glaciers streaming down from the central ice sheet plateau, which extends as a narrow spine along the central part of the peninsula.

This image was acquired by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) on 5 February 2011 at a resolution of 300 m.