NASA's Aqua satellite spotted giant ice swirls stretching for hundreds of miles in the Sea of Okhotsk off Russia's P'yagina Peninsula.
A stunning new satellite image shows an enormous mass of melting sea ice elegantly swirling around a Russian peninsula in the Arctic. Although beautiful, the scene is a sombre reminder of the ever-increasing effects of climate change.
The ethereal white swirls, which appear every year, are made up of melting sea ice being dragged around by ocean currents. The P'yagina Peninsula is a hotspot for these types of swirls because cold air and fresh water deposited into the sea by rivers help create particularly thick sea ice, some of which can still be seen hugging the peninsula's north coastline in the image.
Ice swirls like this can come in a range of shapes and sizes. In December 2022, an extreme cold snap in the U.K. created a host of mini ice swirls, or"ice pancakes," on rivers in Scotland that were formed by tiny spiraling currents known as eddies. The larger Russian swirls can sometimes persist for months and are occasionally pushed as far south as Japan. In 2018, several large swirls, each measuring more than 31 miles across, were spotted off the coast of Hokkaido, the country's northernmost island, Japanese news site The Mainichi reported at the time.
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