(Image: USGS/ESA)

An underwater view up through the ice on a forest pond? A frosty window in negative? An abstract charcoal drawing? No: this is the work of the Landsat 8 satellite as it looked down on the southern tip of Greenland on 30 May this year. Those bold black branches are fjords, with crystal-like glaciers feeding into them, and the smudge on the left is cloud. The ultimate fate of the ice is barely visible in the black sea as the white specks of icebergs.

Landsat 8 is not in orbit to make art, of course, and the scientific story of Greenland’s ice sheet is far from pretty. In the past decade it has lost huge amounts of ice – new understanding of what is happening to this and other ice sheets led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to estimate that the world’s seas are likely to rise by up to 0.98 metres by 2100. Ironically, around Greenland itself the sea level may well fall.

This isn’t the only impressive image in Landsat’s portfolio: take a look at the geometric brilliance of Kansas, graphic evidence of deforestation in Brazil or the path that a tornado scoured across Massachusetts.