An incredible picture of ‘Antarctica from space’ has had social media in awe this week, but it’s not actually a real photo.
It is a satellite image of the Earth from space, but the South Pole has been digitally constructed based on scientific ice data.

Picture of ‘Antarctica from space’
The viral picture is an image of the bottom of our planet, showing the vast expanse of white ice covering the continent of Antarctica.
Antarctica is a virtually uninhabited, ice-covered landmass. Its isolated terrain shelters rich wildlife, including many penguins.
Everyone is in awe at the picture, with one person writing on Twitter: “That is awesome” and another adding: “So beautiful.”
It’s not what it seems
However, the photo is actually a computer-generated image that shows the amount of sea ice around Antarctica more than 15 years ago.
This sea ice isn’t visible from space, but the depiction was released in 2007 to help people visualise the ice around the South Pole.
Two images were created, one for the Arctic and another for Antarctica, and they both show the sea ice on September 21, 2005.
A post on NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio explains the color of the sea ice is derived from the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature.
The extent of the sea ice was determined by the AMSR-E sea ice concentration and the global cloud cover was obtained from Blue Marble cloud data distributed in 2002.
This is not a photo of Antarctica from space, but it's even better: it's a composite from several different NASA Earth-observing satellites, which created a set of information what wouldn't be visible with a simple picture
[read more: https://t.co/Cdp1hl4Ez2] pic.twitter.com/flhEKyTFt4
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 7, 2023View Tweet
Some weren’t fooled
While many were amazed by the fake photo of Antarctica from space, others were quick to realise it was actually CGI.
One person wrote: “Amazing there’s no cloud cover, oh wait it’s partly CGI.”
You realise that’s not an actual picture, right?” said another.
A third added: “This is not a real photo, it’s an image that was rendered on a computer. Still cool though.”
“Antarctica is NOT above the clouds. Nice CGI,” someone else tweeted.
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