Thursday, March 1, 2012

Crack Embiggened

Last year ABC covered the discovery by NASA of a crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica with a number of stories; for example "Large Crack appears in Antarctic glacier". NASA provide the image above with a caption that reads as follows:
Pine Island Glacier -Crack in the shelf
A close-up image of the crack spreading across the ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier shows the details of the boulder-like blocks of ice that fell into the rift when it split. For most of the 18-mile stretch of the crack that NASA’s DC-8 flew over on Oct. 26, 2011, it stretched about 240 feet wide, as roughly seen here. The deepest points ranged from about 165 to 190 feet, roughly equal to the top of the ice shelf down to sea level. Scientists expect the crack to propagate and the ice shelf to calve an iceberg of more than 300 square miles in the coming months. This image was captured by the Digital Mapping System (DMS) aboard the DC-8. Credit: NASA/DMS.


Note the highlighted text. 240ft is about 73m.

Perusing the SMH website this evening we came across a report that is essentially a re-hash of last year's news. But what caught our eye was the same NASA photo, but this time the width of the crack is somewhat different. The image below is a screen capture of the SMH home page for March 1 at about 10.30pm. Exactly the same photo, but this time SMH make the same crack 250m across. Talk about a fractured fairy tale. These guys never cease to split my sides.

We thought the title Crack Embiggened a little fairer, hence the change.
 

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