How pieces work
A piece is one glacier or one iceberg. Each glacier is one entry of the Randolph Glacier Inventory and keeps its inventory identifier. Each iceberg is one name on the USNIC list. A glacier has one adopter at a time. An iceberg has two exclusive parent places and any number of guardians.
How names work
Glaciers. Most of the 274,531 glaciers have no official name. For those, we show the inventory identifier and describe the glacier by its region and size. We only show a proper name where one is recorded in the inventory or in a public gazetteer. A name on this site is not an official name.
Icebergs. USNIC names an iceberg with a letter for the Antarctic quadrant where it was first seen, followed by a number, and a suffix letter when it breaks into pieces. A23A is the largest remaining part of A23. Names are not chosen by us.
Your nickname. You can add a nickname to your piece. It is checked for abuse and appears on your certificate. It never replaces the official name.
How images are made
We look for the most recent satellite pass over the piece with the least cloud. We take the visible red, green and blue bands, crop around the piece and apply one contrast stretch so that the picture is readable. We do not repaint, sharpen, upscale or add anything. Each picture shows its date and source. If there is no clear image, the page says so and shows the latest clear one with its date.
Some pictures on the site today are early samples from NASA and USGS. We replace them as our own image pipeline goes live.
How farewells work
USNIC does not announce when an iceberg ends. We watch the weekly list. When a named iceberg is missing for four weeks, its page shows that we are waiting for confirmation. If it is still missing after eight weeks, we mark it as in farewell, issue a certificate of passing to each adopter and keep a memorial page with its last clear picture and its track.
An iceberg may be missing from the list because it broke up, melted or drifted below the size USNIC tracks. We cannot always tell which. The memorial says what we know and nothing more.
What we do not know
- Glacier outlines are a snapshot. Many were drawn from images taken years before the inventory was published, so a glacier today may be smaller.
- Iceberg sizes on the list are rough estimates of length and width, not surveys.
- Cloud, polar night and satellite schedules limit how often we have a clear picture.
- We may have errors. If you find one, we want to fix it.
Ask for a correction
Tell us the piece, what looks wrong and, if you can, a source. Use the contact form with the topic Data correction, or write to contact@adoptice.com. Corrections to the underlying science should also go to the data provider.
