A warm winter melted the snow off a 'grinning ice skull' on Vega Island, and scientists say its jaw will soon shift

On October 10, 2026, Landsat 9 passed over Vega Island, just east of the Antarctic Peninsula. From orbit, part of the island looks like a skull in profile, teeth showing, facing a little rock called Devil Island.

In that picture, large stretches of the face are gray instead of white. The snow that covered these glaciers in March 2025 was missing.

NASA Earth Observatory published the image on October 30 as "Vega Island Frozen in Fright." Bare ice is easy to see from space. How much ice the glaciers lose in the coming summer has not been measured yet.

Nunatak, moraine and Devil's Bay

Lauren Dauphin of NASA Earth Observatory made the images from Landsat 9 data distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey. Lindsey Doermann wrote the story that ran with them.

NASA set the October view beside one from March 22, 2025. Clouds sat over the island in March 2026, so the comparison had to go back a year.

The eye socket is a nunatak, a rock peak poking up through the ice. The mouth is a lateral moraine, a line of rubble left along the side of a glacier. The jaw is Bahía del Diablo, or Devil's Bay Glacier.

In the March 2025 image a layer of snow covers the ice. By October 2026 the snow is gone from wide areas. Darker glacier ice shows through across the face.

June heat at Esperanza Station

Mauri Pelto is a glaciologist at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. He told NASA that warm weather during the 2026 winter, mainly in June, was partly to blame for the bare ice.

He gave more detail on October 24 on his blog, From a Glacier's Perspective. May, June, July and August were all warmer than average, he wrote. September was close to normal.

On the October 10 scene he marked several glaciers with snow on about half their surface or less. Some were on Vega Island and others on the western half of James Ross Island. He also found bare ice on the Eagle Island ice cap and on the Trinity Coast.

Esperanza Station is Argentina's base on Hope Bay, at the northern tip of the peninsula. On June 5 and 6, 2026, it logged a high of 59.7°F (15.4°C). The figure comes from a paper in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences published September 18.

That was 34.4°F (19.1°C) above the station's 1991 to 2020 average. The daily mean stayed above freezing for eight days starting June 3.

The authors blamed a blocking high-pressure system over the Drake Passage and Scotia Sea. It strengthened northwesterly winds over the peninsula and set off a foehn effect, a warm, dry wind blowing down the slope, on its eastern side.

Bare ice before the melt

On his blog, Pelto added that the gray patches do not mean the glaciers melted in winter. Little new snow fell, and wind scouring and sublimation, when snow turns straight into vapor, reduced it further.

"The winter season was no treat for these glaciers," he said.

Bare ice is darker than snow and soaks up more sunlight, so Pelto expects faster melt if it persists. Wildfire soot darkened ice in the Rockies in a similar way. In the Arctic, red snow algae darken the ice.

According to Pelto, even a thin cover of new snow from a spring storm would help in the short run. Without it, the face on Vega Island will start to wear down.

"When entombed in snow and ice, the skull is preserved. But when exposed to melt, it weathers away, which will lead to a changing jawline and expanding eye socket," Pelto said.

Twenty-nine glaciers counted in 1982

Jorge Rabassa and three colleagues made the first glacier inventory of James Ross and Vega islands. They used topographic maps, early Landsat images and aerial photos. Their 1982 paper in Annals of Glaciology counted 29 glaciers on Vega Island, NASA says.

Pedro Skvarca, one of those authors, later tracked Devil's Bay Glacier with Hernán De Angelis and Evgeniy Ermolin.

Their 2004 paper reported an average yearly loss of about 1 foot (0.32 meters) of water equivalent from 1999 to 2003. The largest losses came in the two warmest summers.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service lists the glacier at 4.9 square miles (12.8 square kilometers) in 2025. It covered 5.5 square miles (14.3 square kilometers) in 2008. Between 2020 and 2022 its front moved back about 164 feet (50 meters) a year.

Reunion at Cape Well-met

The Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901 to 1903 was led by Otto Nordenskjöld. NASA says the party split into three groups and lost its ship, the Antarctic, to pack ice.

Two of the groups reunited in 1903 at a point on Vega Island that became known as Cape Well-met. NASA places it off the forehead of the skull.

The cape was named for the meeting of a relief party led by Johan Gunnar Andersson with the winter party led by Nordenskjöld. The Argentine naval vessel Uruguay later rescued the survivors.

Spring snowfall still unmeasured

NASA's comparison rests on two clear days, 19 months apart. Neither image measures snow depth or ice thickness. The 2026 to 2027 melt season is still ahead.

A few spring storms could still bury the gray patches. No field data from Devil's Bay Glacier for this season had been published by early November.

Satellite images have shown that glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula flow up to 22 percent faster in summer. For now, the skull still grins at Devil Island, with far less snow on its jaw than in March 2025.

The information was obtained from NASA Earth Observatory.

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