File:Amery Ice Shelf (MODIS 2021-10-25).jpg

English: October marks the beginning of summer in Antarctica—that time of year when the sun shines all day, every day and the temperature begins to rise. The long hours of sunshine from October until March allow excellent satellite views of the icy terrain which lays hidden during the winter (March through September). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite captured a true-color image of East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf on October 22, 2021. Although the Amery Ice Shelf makes up only a small portion of the Antarctic coastline—a swath about the size of the state of West Virginia—this ice shelf drains about 16 percent of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Like other ice shelves, the Amery deposits ice into the ocean through the natural cyclical process of iceberg calving. This process can be extremely slow, sometime taking decades to complete. The last iceberg broke from the Amery Ice Shelf in 2019.