NASA Satellite Images Reveal New Island In Alaska Formed By Decades Of Glacial Retreat

Global warming is a tricksy beast. In some places, it’s transforming once-lush environments into barren deserts ; in others, it’s doing essentially the opposite – albeit through an irony-fueled, monkey’s paw kind of interpretation of “re-green the Earth’s deserts ”. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Now, a new set of photos from NASA has laid bare a striking example of the latter effect – and it’s right on our doorstep. Alaska, it turns out, has a new island – not thanks to new land rising up through the seas, but because of glacial melt so dramatic that it has surrounded a piece of land previously connected to the mainland.

“Along the coastal plain of southeastern Alaska, water is rapidly replacing ice,” NASA a