Greenland is the world’s largest island, and about 80 percent of its surface is covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet, the second largest ice mass on Earth after the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
This image combines three acquisitions taken by Sentinel-1’s radar over the same area in January, February and March 2026. Radar images are not usually in color, but here each acquisition has been assigned a different color, and, when overlaid, the resulting colors represent variations that have occurred on the surface between the three scans.
Stable ice can be seen in white in the left of the image, while the shades of grey depict surfaces that have either not changed or changed very little. Colors are mainly concentrated in the water along the coast and show visible changes in type and cover of the constantly moving sea ice.
Three main outlet glaciers are visible in the image: the 79N (Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden) and the Zachariae Isstrøm to the north, and the Storstrømmen to the south. These glaciers constitute the main front ends of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS), a long ice stream that connects the interior to the ocean, draining approximately 12-17 percent of the Greenland Ice Sheet into the North Atlantic through these three glaciers.
Image Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2026), processed by ESA
