Recherchebreen is a glacier in Svalbard, Norway which, according to the Glacier Atlas of Svalbard and Jan Mayen (Hagen et al., 1993: http://hdl.handle.net/11250/173065), surged in 1838 and 1945. European Space Agency Copernicus Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data show that this glacier has begun a new surge (Fig. 1). Figure 2 shows that the surge started in late 2017 and is ongoing at the date of this post in November 2018. I may post updates of this surge here, possibly including an animation of satellite data when the surge becomes very active.

recherchebreen_1000

Figure 1. Velocity maps of Recherchebreen derived using feature tracking between consecutive images from the European Space Agency Copernicus Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar data in late 2017 and late 2018.

 

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Figure 2. Timeseries of velocities of Recherchebreen measured using feature tracking of all consecutive image pairs from Sentinel-1 at a point approximately 1km from the 2017 ice-front