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Antarctic glacier caught stealing ice from neighbour
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By European Space Agency
Combining 25 years of space-based data with ocean sampling, scientists have uncovered a change in the microscopic organisms that underpin the Southern Ocean’s food chain and carbon storage.
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By NASA
Left: Gigantic Jet Event from the International Space Station, taken by NASA Astronaut Nichole Ayers. (Credit: Ayers) Right: Sprite event appearing over a lightning strike, seen from space. This photo was taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station during Expedition 44. Credit: NASA astronauts on board Expedition 44 Did you see that gorgeous photo NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took on July 3, 2025? Originally thought to be a sprite, Ayers confirmed catching an even rarer form of a Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) — a gigantic jet.
“Nichole Ayers caught a rare and spectacular form of a TLE from the International Space Station — a gigantic jet,” said Dr. Burcu Kosar, Principal Investigator of the Spritacular project.
Gigantic jets are a powerful type of electrical discharge that extends from the top of a thunderstorm into the upper atmosphere. They are typically observed by chance — often spotted by airline passengers or captured unintentionally by ground-based cameras aimed at other phenomena. Gigantic jets appear when the turbulent conditions at towering thunderstorm tops allow for lightning to escape the thunderstorm, propagating upwards toward space. They create an electrical bridge between the tops of the clouds (~20 km) and the upper atmosphere (~100 km), depositing a significant amount of electrical charge.
Sprites, on the other hand, are one of the most commonly observed types of TLEs — brief, colorful flashes of light that occur high above thunderstorms in the mesosphere, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Unlike gigantic jets, which burst upward directly from thundercloud tops, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, following powerful lightning strikes. They usually appear as a reddish glow with intricate shapes resembling jellyfish, columns, or carrots and can span tens of kilometers across. Sprites may also be accompanied or preceded by other TLEs, such as Halos and ELVEs (Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources), making them part of a larger and visually spectacular suite of high-altitude electrical activity. The world of Transient Luminous Events is a hidden zoo of atmospheric activity playing out above the storms. Have you captured an image of a jet, sprite, or other type of TLE? Submit your photos to Spritacular.org to help scientists study these fascinating night sky phenomena!
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Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Ocean currents swirl around North America (center left) and Greenland (upper right) in this data visualization created using NASA’s ECCO model. Advanced computing is helping oceanographers decipher hot spots of phytoplankton growth.NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio As Greenland’s ice retreats, it’s fueling tiny ocean organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model out of JPL and MIT that’s been called a laboratory in itself.
Runoff from Greenland’s ice sheet is kicking nutrients up from the ocean depths and boosting phytoplankton growth, a new NASA-supported study has found. Reporting in Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, the scientists used state-of-the art-computing to simulate marine life and physics colliding in one turbulent fjord. Oceanographers are keen to understand what drives the tiny plantlike organisms, which take up carbon dioxide and power the world’s fisheries.
Greenland’s mile-thick ice sheet is shedding some 293 billion tons (266 billion metric tons) of ice per year. During peak summer melt, more than 300,000 gallons (1,200 cubic meters) of fresh water drain into the sea every second from beneath Jakobshavn Glacier, also known as Sermeq Kujalleq,the most active glacier on the ice sheet. The waters meet and tumble hundreds of feet below the surface.
Teal-colored phytoplankton bloom off the Greenland coast in this satellite image captured in June 2024 by NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission.NASA The meltwater plume is fresh and more buoyant than the surrounding saltwater. As it rises, scientists have hypothesized, it may be delivering nutrients like iron and nitrate — a key ingredient in fertilizer — to phytoplankton floating at the surface.
Researchers track these microscopic organisms because, though smaller by far than a pinhead, they’re titans of the ocean food web. Inhabiting every ocean from the tropics to the polar regions, they nourish krill and other grazers that, in turn, support larger animals, including fish and whales.
Previous work using NASA satellite data found that the rate of phytoplankton growth in Arctic waters surged 57% between 1998 and 2018 alone. An infusion of nitrate from the depths would be especially pivotal to Greenland’s phytoplankton in summer, after most nutrients been consumed by prior spring blooms. But the hypothesis has been hard to test along the coast, where the remote terrain and icebergs as big as city blocks complicate long-term observations.
“We were faced with this classic problem of trying to understand a system that is so remote and buried beneath ice,” said Dustin Carroll, an oceanographer at San José State University who is also affiliated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We needed a gem of a computer model to help.”
Sea of Data
To re-create what was happening in the waters around Greenland’s most active glacier, the team harnessed a model of the ocean developed at JPL and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The model ingests nearly all available ocean measurements collected by sea- and satellite-based instruments over the past three decades. That amounts to billions of data points, from water temperature and salinity to pressure at the seafloor. The model is called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean-Darwin (ECCO-Darwin for short).
Simulating “biology, chemistry, and physics coming together” in even one pocket along Greenland’s 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers) of coastline is a massive math problem, noted lead author Michael Wood, a computational oceanographer at San José State University. To break it down, he said the team built a “model within a model within a model” to zoom in on the details of the fjord at the foot of the glacier.
Using supercomputers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, they calculated that deepwater nutrients buoyed upward by glacial runoff would be sufficient to boost summertime phytoplankton growth by 15 to 40% in the study area.
More Changes in Store
Could increased phytoplankton be a boon for Greenland’s marine animals and fisheries? Carroll said that untangling impacts to the ecosystem will take time. Melt on the Greenland ice sheet is projected to accelerate in coming decades, affecting everything from sea level and land vegetation to the saltiness of coastal waters.
“We reconstructed what’s happening in one key system, but there’s more than 250 such glaciers around Greenland,” Carroll said. He noted that the team plans to extend their simulations to the whole Greenland coast and beyond.
Some changes appear to be impacting the carbon cycle both positively and negatively: The team calculated how runoff from the glacier alters the temperature and chemistry of seawater in the fjord, making it less able to dissolve carbon dioxide. That loss is canceled out, however, by the bigger blooms of phytoplankton taking up more carbon dioxide from the air as they photosynthesize.
Wood added: “We didn’t build these tools for one specific application. Our approach is applicable to any region, from the Texas Gulf to Alaska. Like a Swiss Army knife, we can apply it to lots of different scenarios.”
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-101
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Last Updated Aug 06, 2025 Related Terms
Earth Carbon Cycle Earth Science Ice & Glaciers Jet Propulsion Laboratory Oceans PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) Water on Earth Explore More
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By European Space Agency
Using data from several Earth-observing satellites, including ESA’s CryoSat and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, scientists have discovered that a huge flood beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet surged upwards with such force that it fractured the ice sheet, resulting in a vast quantity of meltwater bursting through the ice surface.
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By USH
NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured a stunning image of a rare red lightning phenomenon known as a “sprite” from the International Space Station on July 3. The jellyfish-shaped electrical burst was seen rising above a massive thunderstorm over Mexico and the southern U.S., including parts of California and Texas.
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur high in the mesosphere, triggered by positive lightning strikes.
Part of a group of upper-atmosphere events called Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), sprites are still not fully understood, despite decades of research.View the full article
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