Week 1 Interactive Exercise - Iceberg Calving
For this first interactive exercise you will be introduced to the NASA Worldview platform. On NASA World View we will view optical satellite imagery showing an iceberg calving from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica in November 2018. Iceberg calving is the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier. This iceberg, known as B46, was about 3 times the size of New York’s Manhattan island.
- Visit NASA Worldview
- You will see a box in the middle of the screentitled ‘Welcome to Worldview’ with a selection of stories. Choose the oneentitled ‘Pine Island Glacier/Iceberg B46’. This will take you to a view of the Antarctic.
- Go through the steps in the box on the right-hand side of the screen which will zoom you in to the Pine Island Glacier. This glacier is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, responsible for about 25% of Antarctica's ice loss.
- In the 4th step you can view a video time-lapse of the iceberg breaking away.
- You can now change the dates to a period of your choice, zoom out and/or into other areas and see if there’s any other iceberg calving’s or glacier changes you can spot.
Course topics
The core videos of this course are labelled as topic videos.
We have also provided a range of optional further reading, links, and additional resources to help consolidate your learning. Here is a summary of what is available:
Topic links and resources
In each topic, once you have watched the video and read the accompanying text, you will find the following information:
- Optional Further Reading: These are external links to further reading.
- Featured Images and Animations: Below the text on each video page, you’ll find the featured images and featured animations.
- Interactives: On the 'Interactives' tab on relevent topic pages, you will find a satellite tracking application showing the current location of the satellites, a data viewer from the ESA WEkEO platform, as well as a data viewer, specially created for this course, allowing you to explore a selection of data relevant to the themes and topics in this course. (Please note that due to maintenance, the data viewer is currently unavailable).
Quizzes and comments
- Quizzes: At the end of each week there will be a quizz consisting of around five questions. These will help you consolidate your understanding of new topics, but are not scored. The feedback given with each answer also will also provide you with important information.
Weekly interactive exercises
At the end of each week, we have included a guided exercise, using interactive apps available on other websites, to help you become more familiar with looking at and working with EO datasets. You will be guided through the process of searching for, comparing and drawing conclusions from data relevant to some of the topics covered in that week.
