NASA’s Halloween satellite picture of Antarctica’s Vega Island shows ice shaped like a skull

A Landsat 9 image of Vega Island, an ice-covered speck in the Weddell Sea east of the Antarctic Peninsula, shows a profile that looks like a skull. NASA’s Earth Observatory published it on October 30, 2026 under the Halloween-timed name Vega Island Frozen in Fright. The scene was acquired on October 10, and the features that make up the face are real geography.

Help yourself and the planet: The Cool Down makes it easy to help yourself while helping the planet, with smart, simple changes to save more and waste less in your everyday life.

Get The Cool Down →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.

Rock, debris and glacier make up the face

According to the Earth Observatory story by Lindsey Doermann, with images by Lauren Dauphin built from USGS Landsat data, each part of the face has a glaciological identity. The eye socket is a nunatak, a rock outcrop poking through the ice. The mouth is a lateral moraine, the ridge of debris that collects along the edge of a glacier. The jawbone is Bahía del Diablo, or Devil’s Bay, Glacier, and the skull faces Devil Island across the water.

NASA compares the October 2026 scene with one captured by the Operational Land Imager on March 22, 2025. The earlier view shows a fresh layer of snow, typical of March, the region’s wettest month. By October 2026 that cover has gone from large areas, exposing darker bare ice and sharpening the outlines that give the island its look. Clouds hid the island in March 2026, so no image from that month could be used.

Little snowfall, not winter melt, bared the ice

Glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College supplied the explanation. NASA attributes the exposed ice partly to above-average temperatures during winter 2026, especially in June, along with limited new snowfall and the sublimation and wind scouring that strip snow from the surface. In a post on his blog from October 24, Pelto adds a caution: the bare ice on the October 10 image is not an indicator of melt during winter. May through August all ran warmer than average, he writes, and September was near normal.

The Landsat scene is wider than the skull. Pelto reports that glaciers on Vega Island, the western half of James Ross Island and the Trinity Coast have snow covering roughly 50% or less of their surfaces, that the Eagle Island ice cap has significant bare areas, and that large bare patches lie along the Trinity Coast between Boydell and Diplock Glaciers. He summed up the season for these glaciers with the line, “The winter season was no treat for these glaciers.”

Pelto’s reasoning on what comes next is about energy balance. If bare ice persists when the melt season starts, he writes, melt will likely increase, because exposed ice absorbs more solar radiation and emits less longwave radiation than snow-covered ice does. The picture NASA published for Halloween is therefore also a snapshot of a surface that, on Pelto’s reading, faces faster melt as days lengthen.

Bare ice matters because it absorbs more solar energy than snow, so melting is expected to speed up as days lengthen. Pelto told NASA that when entombed in snow and ice, the skull is preserved, and warned that melt would change the jawline and enlarge the eye socket. A thin cover of new snow from a spring storm, he said, would be helpful in the short run.

Four decades of measurements stand behind the picture

Scientists have catalogued this ice for more than forty years. J. Rabassa and colleagues described the island’s four ice caps and 29 glaciers in 1982, using early Landsat data, aerial photographs and topographic maps, in a paper in Annals of Glaciology. P. Skvarca and colleagues later examined the mass balance of Devil’s Bay Glacier in a 2004 study in the same journal.

Devil’s Bay Glacier has been monitored since the 1998-1999 austral summer, and researchers have measured an overall decline in its mass; the World Glacier Monitoring Service profile for the glacier holds the record. Satellite images from recent decades also show ice loss from other Vega Island glaciers, with more bedrock exposed.

Pairing the October 2026 scene with the March 2025 view shows how much the surface depends on the season. In March the fresh snow covers the darker ice, and by October the exposed ice and rock stand out against what snow remains, so the face NASA describes is a product of when the satellite passes over as much as of the terrain beneath.

The island has a human history too. NASA notes that the Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901 to 1903 split into three groups after pack ice took its ship, and that two groups reunited in spring 1903 at what is now Cape Well-met, on the skull’s forehead. An Argentinean expedition later rescued the survivors.

What happens to the face this summer depends on the weather Pelto named. If spring snow arrives before the melt season is well along, the bare ice may be covered again. If it does not, the Landsat record will show whether the jawline of Devil’s Bay Glacier has changed by the time the next clear scene is captured.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

Help yourself and the planet: Get The Cool Down →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.