Image: JOSHUA STEVEN / NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY.

The light blue patch visible at the center of the island in the later photo is also notable as an example of how the snow is melting.

Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, identified the blue patch as a "melt pond," or a pool of water that formed on top of the ice as snow melted, in a report from NASA's Earth Observatory.

While the above images offer a dramatic example of the increasingly-hard-to-ignore effects of climate change, it's even more alarming that February's stretch of warmer temperatures in the Antarctic region was the third of the current season, following similar events in Nov.