A new map of Antarctica displayed recently at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., combines 1,100 digital satellite images into a mosaic with the most geologically accurate, true-colour, high-resolution views of the frozen continent now possible.

The map, with a resolution 10 times greater than before, shows features half the size of a basketball court clearly, and is not pure white. It captures the textures and colour variations of mountains, valleys and ice rivers and is available to researchers and the public online.

“This mosaic of images opens up a window to the Antarctic that we just haven't had before,” said Robert Bindschadler, a NASA scientist who conceived the project. “This innovation is like watching high-definition TV in living colour versus watching the picture on a grainy black-and-white television,” he said. “Anyone with a computer and a Web connection can now travel to Antarctica.”

A NASA site concentrating on educational material about the mosaic is at http://lima.nasa.gov. The map and detailed scientific information are also at a US Geological Survey site at http://lima.usgs.gov.
At the sites, viewers can zoom in to see the stunning detail of the entire continent, except from the South Pole, where NASA's Landsat 7 satellite has no coverage because of its near-polar orbit. The views include the US McMurdo Station, the largest research base in Antarctica, on Ross Island.

A team of researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Geological Survey, the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey compiled the map, called LIMA, for Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica.

The developers said researchers could use the map to improve planning for scientific expeditions and charting rock formations to determine their types and monitoring changes in ice flows and structures caused by temperature variations.

The map will also be valuable in the International Polar Year, a coordinated multinational field campaign that began last March to study the Arctic and Antarctic in hopes of understanding large-scale environmental change in the polar regions.

Bindschadler said the collage of images, most of which were taken by Landsat 7 from 1999 to 2001, provided a baseline for watching Antarctic changes.

The New York Times