NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge to Fly over Antarctica
30.09.2009 - Atmosphere & Space, Water & Oceans, Land & Geology, Ice & Snow, Bi-polar
A series of flights over the Earth's southern ice-covered regions is planned this autumn as a part of a broader study of changes in sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers. A team of modern explorers will fly a DC-8, an "airborne laboratory that can carry many instruments," over the southernmost continent on earth. The NASA crew will fly the plane from California to Punta Arenas, Chile, which they will use as a base form which they will carry out up to seventeen eleven-hour flights over West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and other areas where sea ice is prevalent.
The series of flights is part of Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year campaign of annual flights to each of the Earth's Polar Regions. Data collected during the campaign will help bridge the gap NASA's Ice, Cloud and Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which is down to operating with its last of three lasers, and ICESat-II, which is scheduled to launch in 2014. Besides maintaining the record of changes, Operation Ice Bridge will be providing new information unavailable from space, such as the shape of the terrain located below the ice.
The first flights in the campaign took researchers over Greenland and the Arctic Ocean. Led by principal investigator Seelye Martin from the University of Washington, this fall's campaign will be the first sustained airborne research effort of its kind over Antarctica.
However remote, Antarctica is an important link in the Earth's climate system and it is home to 90 percent of the freshwater supplies on Earth and could thus contribute greatly to sea level rise. The distinction between both poles of our planet goes beyond the simple north-south divide. Unlike the situation in the Arctic, Antarctica has known an increase in sea ice in some coastal areas and accumulation of snow and ice in West-Antarctica. Although the changes are different due to a more complex configuration in Antarctica, scientists agree that we are now facing one of the major changes in the Earth's climate since the last ice age.
