First Flight Completed for Operation Ice Bridge
20.10.2009 - Land & Geology, Other, Antarctic
The first in a long series of flights under Operation Ice Bridge took off on October 16th from Punta Arenas, Chile. A research program by NASA in cooperation with university researchers to image what's happening both on and under the ice in West Antarctica, the purpose of Operation Ice Bridge is to estimate future sea-level rises that might result as ice in this region melts.
Selected as the only clear area available at the moment, the Getz Ice Shelf was chosen as the first destination in Operation Ice Bridge. The DC-8 flew two parallel tracks on both sides of the "grounding line" - the limit between floating ice and land ice - from which scientists can determine the rate at which the ice shelf is melting.
With 31 people and various scientific instruments on board, the DC-8 was able to:
- survey the bottom topography of the ice shelf using MCoRDS (Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder)
- search for the presence of under-ice water with a gravimeter
- make ice surface topography measurements with an ATM (Airborne Topographic Mapper) laser instrument
- make observations of the sea ice with an LVIS (Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor) and a DMS (Digital Mapping Camera).
Cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,000 metres), the aircraft descended to 1,500 feet (4,600 metres) east of the Scott Peninsula to make some low altitude measurements. With a total of 3.5 hours of low-level flight and approximately 200 million laser measurements, the team returned after 11 hours and 45 minutes of flight.
Since 2003, laser measurements of ice surfaces from NASA's ICESat satellite have shown that vast ice masses in Greenland and West Antarctica are thinning and flowing quickly towards the oceans. The NASA satellite reaches the end of its life this year, and another will not be launched until 2015, so in the meantime, Operation Ice Bridge flights will continue and expand upon the satellite mission.
