NASA has captured a massive ice fracture that formed in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska earlier this winter.
At the start of the video you can see cracks forming on the left side of the screen. The fissures soon spread across the entire screen, a distance of some 1,000 km in real life.
The cracks started to form in early January because of warm weather and then spread over a number of days due to a series of bad storms, according to NASA. The cracks eventually reached Canada's Bank Islands.
“It took just seven days for the fractures to progress across the entire area from west to east,” Trudy Wohlleben, senior ice forecaster at the Canadian Ice Service told the National Post.
"While fracturing events are common, few events sprawl across such a large area or produce cracks as long and wide as those seen here," NASA explains. One of the factors is that the ice in the region is newer and more prone to being affected by warm weather and strong winds.
2012 saw record melting of the Arctic ice pack, a phenomenon believed to be related to climate change.
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