page_title: Pine Island Glacier
section_title: Ice sheet drainage
hierarchical_section_title: Pine Island Glacier / Ice sheet drainage
caption_attribution_description: English: Landsat image of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, from NASA
context_page_description: Pine Island Glacier is a large ice stream, and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, responsible for about 25% of Antarctica's ice loss. The glacier ice streams flow west-northwest along the south side of the Hudson Mountains into Pine Island Bay, Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. It was mapped by the United States Geological Survey from surveys and United States Navy air photos, 1960–66, and named by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in association with Pine Island Bay.
  The area drained by Pine Island Glacier comprises about 10% of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Satellite measurements have shown that the Pine Island Glacier Basin has a greater net contribution of ice to the sea than any other ice drainage basin in the world and this has increased due to recent acceleration of the ice stream.
  An iceberg about twice the size of Washington, DC broke off from the glacier in February 2020. Pine Island Glacier's ice velocity has accelerated to over 33 feet per day.
  The ice stream is extremely remote, with the nearest continually occupied research station at Rothera, nearly 1,300 km away.
context_section_description: The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest mass of ice on earth, containing a volume of water equivalent to 57 m (187 ft) of global sea level. The ice sheet forms from snow which falls onto the continent and compacts under its own weight. The ice then moves under its own weight toward the edges of the continent. Most of this transport to the sea is by ice streams (faster moving channels of ice surrounded by slower moving ice walls) and outlet glaciers. The Antarctic ice sheet consists of the large, relatively stable, East Antarctic Ice Sheet and a smaller, less stable, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is drained into the sea by several large ice streams, most of which flow into either  Ross Ice Shelf, or Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers are two major West Antarctic ice streams which do not flow into a large ice shelf. They are part of an area called the Amundsen Sea Embayment. A total area of 175,000 km² (68,000 sq mi), 10 percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, drains out to the sea via Pine Island Glacier, this area is known as the Pine Island Glacier drainage basin.
caption: Floating ice shelf at the downstream end of Pine Island Glacier. The crack shows the start of a large iceberg calving
exif: {}