The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
For several years now, scientists have known that a glacier can actually detach from the mountain rock and gush down to the valley at speeds of up to 300 kilometres an hour as a fluid ice-rock avalanche. However, a paper published recently in The Cryosphere describes how a team of scientists working in ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Glaciers team has discovered, together with several colleagues, that these glacier detachments have happened much more often than had been known. The image, based on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, shows the traces of ice/rock avalanches that occurred in 2017 and 2018, resulting from vast flows of rock and ice that finally partly blocked a river in the valley below.
Read full story: Glacier avalanches more common than thought