What is this formation on sea, seen from the air?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 31 Jul, 2023
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Ice, ‘burgy bits’ I think is the term. Basically, once the pack ice breaks up, and the glacial icebergs smash into each other, the smaller pieces keep on floating in the Labrador current down the east coast of Nfld. The current keeps the structure, and gives the ‘hard edge’, and this stuff flows south until it melts. Locals, don’t hammer me for Burgy bits, I know there is some technical component to being identified that way, but from 40K feet, it is hard to tell the relative size.
Ice, ice is your answer. Welcome to the north Atlantic in the late spring!
Measured very crudely on the image, and compared to how large the wingtip of a 767 ought to appear from a window, it would appear that the length of the red dashed line on the image is between 50% and 100% of the altitude the picture is taken from. That means the true size of the small white smears that make up the formation is in the range of tens of meters.
That seems too large to be breaking waves and too small to be clouds, but it could be ice floes. The National Snow and Ice Data Center has a daily updated map of the extent of Arctic sea ice, and on the currently shown July 2 map (which I can’t link to directly) there seems to be a patch of ice left off the coast of Labrador, in roughly the spot marked on the Flightradar24 screenshot. It could well have stretched further into the ocean a week ago.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘