How much is the polar ice melting, and how are the sheets being affected by climate change? These are some of the questions that NASA’s Operation IceBridge seeks to answer. You can see a quick overview of the mission in the video above.
“IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission, is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown,” NASA stated in the YouTube description accompanying the video.
“It will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice. These flights will provide a yearly, multi-instrument look at the behavior of the rapidly changing features of the Greenland and Antarctic ice,” the agency added.
The aerial survey is intended to supplement information from NASA’s Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which has been orbiting Earth since 2003, and the forthcoming ICESat-2 that is expected to launch in early 2016.
The surveys started in 2009 and are expected to wrap up in 2016. This year’s field season runs from about March to May. For more information on IceBridge, check out this 2013 Universe Today article by Ken Kremer.
Steven Hawking famously calculated that black holes should evaporate, converting into particles and energy over…
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…