“Crack in the Ice” by Alasdair Turner is one of the entries in the 2016 National Nature Photographer of the Year contest. It’s one of the editors’ favorites in the Environmental Issues category.
Turner captioned the photo:
A crack in sea ice of the Southern Ross Sea, Antarctica. As the cracks open they refreeze immediately creating the series of lines you see in this images. The black line in the center is very thin ice. Specs of windblown dirt from the Mt Erebus Volcano are also covering the ice surface which increases the melting of the sea ice. This image is part of an ongoing 3 year project to document the most remote ocean on the planet and its rarely seen places.
The photo is downloadable as wallpaper for desktop, tablet, or phone.
Contest winners are to be announced early this month. In the meantime, be sure to visit the site and enjoy the hundreds of entries on display.
____________________
Note, Dec. 9, 2016: The winners have been announced!
Spectacular. Although also worrying.
Very worrying. Some cracks are normal, of course, but huge chunks of Antarctic ice are breaking loose, and that’s bad.
I thought it was a track that had been made for vehicles to go through at first glance!
Very impressive, although I found myself wishing for some object or person in the photo to show perspective/size. Are the ice cliffs 8 feet high or 25 feet high?
Good point, although adding something for perspective might have spoiled the symmetry, or distracted, or something. I suppose I got too caught up in the explanation of how this came to be, whatever its size. So much in the natural world to see and understand; so little time!
Beautiful photo! Does NatGeo have a large selection of Royalty Free images for bloggers to use, or can you purchase rights?
Note in the post there’s a link to a wallpaper section. Each image there has links for downloading. NatGeo says:
Spectacular! I would have liked more information also. So many things we don’t know yet about global warming…
NASA recently released this photo of a giant crack making its way across a portion of the Antarctic ice shelf. They’ve estimated this Larsen C ice shelf fracture to be about 70 miles long, more than 300 feet wide, and about a third of a mile deep. When the crack gets all the way across the ice shelf, a piece the size of Delaware will break off.
https://piedtype.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/nasaiceshelfcrack.jpg
(Image: NASA/John Sonntag)
Notice to all penguins: WATCH YOUR STEP!!
No kidding. They’d have a bit of a problem with this …
LOVE your new layout!!!
Oh, thanks! I’d really wanted to freshen things up for quite a while, but it turned out about all I could do was revert to something closer to the original theme, which I had altered a lot over several years.
If NG has it in the Wallpaper section – it’s free download for that purpose/personal use. CR is always listed as a warning against commercial use/textbook/advertisement use without permission. And against bloggers who reblog/collects posts to their site which is only a series of reblogs and a spot where they offer “interesting, free content” to anyone who wants it (although some say in small print in obscure spot that they do not have the rights to any of the stuff shown and if it is “borrowed” the user should contact original producer for permissions.
You are always very clear on sources and give credit as required.
Unfortunate that “tolerance” and “diversity only means “everyone has to think and act just like I do”. You’re pretty classy
Impressive pix, too!
Thanks, phil. I try hard to always do the right thing.
There’s no such thing as global warming.
Okay, if you prefer, climate change.