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
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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
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The animation, which shows the discharge of chunks of ice into the ocean from the Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue in West Antarctica, uses images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission between 14 June 2017 and 7 July 2019. Thwaites is a particularly important part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet because it holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by around 60 cm and is considered by many to be at risk of rapid retreat, threatening coastal communities around the world. Recently, scientists have developed a new Artificial Intelligence, or AI, technique using radar images such as these, to reveal how the Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue is being damaged by squeezing and stretching as it flows from the middle of the continent to the coast. Being able to track fractures and crevasses in the ice beneath the overlying snow is key to better predicting the fate of floating ice tongues under climate change.
Read full story: Sentinel-1 and AI uncover glacier crevasses