NASA captures floating glaciers on Pluto

These hills individually measure one to several kilometres across, according to images and data from New Horizons. 

The hills, which are in the vast ice plain informally named Sputnik Planum within Pluto’s ‘heart,’ are likely miniature versions of the larger, jumbled mountains on Sputnik Planum’s western border. They are yet another example of Pluto’s fascinating and abundant geological activity, NASA said. 

Since water ice is less dense than nitrogen-dominated ice, scientists believe these water ice hills are floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth’s Arctic Ocean. The hills are likely fragments of the rugged uplands that have broken away and are being carried by the nitrogen glaciers into Sputnik Planum. 

At the northern end of the image, the feature informally named Challenger Colles - honouring the crew of the lost space shuttle Challenger - appears to be an especially large accumulation of these hills, measuring 60 by 35 kilometres. The new image was captured using New Horizons’ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) instrument.