An ultra-high resolution map of Antarctica was released Tuesday by NASA and its partners. The map is actually a mosaic made up of 1,100 images taken by the NASA-built Landsat 7 satellite, nearly all of which were captured between 1999 and 2001.

"This innovation is like watching high-definition TV in living color versus watching the picture on a grainy black-and-white television," said Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"These scenes don't just give us a snapshot, they provide a time-lapse historical record of how Antarctica has changed and will enable us to continue to watch changes unfold," Bindschadler said.

These high-quality images are about ten times sharper than previously achieved and will aid scientists studying global warming on the continent, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. NASA's partners on this project, Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (Lima), included the US Geological Survey, the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey.

"This is the highest resolution dataset for the entire continent," said Andrew Flemming from BAS. "There are huge areas that people have simply not seen in this detail before," he told BBC News.

Landsat 7 is just one of 14 satellites operated by NASA which study our planet. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, is scheduled to be replaced by a next-generation satellite in 2011. However, if the existing satellite fails before that date, scientists, land managers and others who depend on Landsat images could be out of luck.

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica is being made freely available over the Web. The whole image mosaic totals a stunning 100 billion pixels. There are two websites where LIMA can be accessed:

* LIMA.USGS.gov, which provides a zoomable, searchable viewer to see the satellite photos from Landsat as well as from Canada's Radarsat, a satellite that captures radar imagery

* LIMA.NASA.gov, which focuses more on user-friendly education and outreach. The Antarctic imagery is presented in a scientific context and linked with an array of interactive extras

A search tool links the NASA site to the USGS Web site.