At first glance, this picture from the International Space Station on August 5 looks innocuous enough. But it shows something profoundly disturbing--a 97 square mile breaking off from the Petermann Glacier, located along Greenland's northwestern coast. The island, which is four times the size of Manhattan, is the biggest to form in the Arctic since 1962. So what's the big deal? According to Jason E. Box, a glacier and climate researcher at Ohio State University, the cleaved glacier is part of a larger pattern of climate warming. It's apropos for this month, which marks the 35th anniversary of the term "global warming". In the slides ahead, we take a look at some other snapshots from NASA that point to a pattern of global warming.

Also taken from the International Space Station, this image shows the Petermann Glacier on July 28, 2010--just days before the ice island broke off.

This photo, captured by NASA's Terra satellite on September 7, 2008, shows a rift in the Petermann Glacier. The rift first showed up in 2001, but this photo proves that it continued to widen, eventually leading to the creation of the ice island described in the previous slide.

NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission tracks monthly averages of crustal uplift on Greenland's ice sheet triggered by ice mass loss. From 2005 to 2008, ice loss has rapidly spread from the southern region to the northwest coast of the ice sheet.

This image, taken from microwave-frequency data, shows the Greenland melt anomaly (the difference between the number of days of ice melting in 2007 compared to the average annual melting days from 1988-2006). According to the image, melting in areas above 6,560 feet climbed 150% above the long-term average.

This 2008 image shows cracks forming in the seaward edge of the Antarctic Peninsula's Wilkins Ice Shelf. The narrow sliver is an ice bridge connecting the shelf to ice remnants at nearby Charcot Island.

By April 2009, the ice bridge melted completely. This photo shows the southern base of the ice bridge at the point where it once connected with the remnant ice shelf. According to NASA, the ice bridge helped stabilize the region's ice fragments.

This 2008 image shows the disintegration of pieces of the Wilkins Ice Shelf into a floating pile of slush, ice fragments, and larger ice bergs.

NASA's Terra satellite gathered this image of the Serson Ice Shelf in 2008. Originally, the northern coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island was surrounded by a continuous sea of ice. But as this picture shows, a warmed-up Arctic climate caused the ice to break into pieces.