This indicates that the melting of the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica is accelerating in an irreversible process of major concern.
The two Sentinel 3-A images have been captured at the same time with the two different sensors. The SLSTR image shows the thermal response (12 µm) of the captured objects: the sea temperature is around 0° C (in red) whereas the ice temperature is lower than around 10 degrees (in yellow). Therefore the thermal response allows us to isolate the breaking iceberg (in yellow) from the sea and from the ice “land” to which it was attached.