Operation Ice Bridge Almost Half Completed
03.11.2009 - Atmosphere & Space, Water & Oceans, Land & Geology, Ice & Snow, Antarctic
Operation Ice Bridge, A research program by NASA in cooperation withuniversity researchers to image what's happening both on and under theice in West Antarctica, has already completed seven of the 17 plannedflights in the research operation, meaning it is almost halway finished and well on its way tofinishing by mid-November. The 17 flights have been focusing onelements such as the ice sheet, glaciers and sea ice in West Antarctica.
So far, the seven flights already completed have included three over glaciers, two over sea ice, one to the Getz Ice Shelf, and one to study the topography of the Antarctic Ice Sheet on the mission's closest approach to the South Pole. The targets of the flights are decided on day to day due to the unpredictable Antarctic weather. A central figure in the study is Pine Island Glacier, which will have as many as four flights surveying it in order to better understand the detailed topography under the glacier's floating ice tongue as the this topography controls the rate of melting.
Another major first has been the mission's sea ice flight, which took scientists to the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas to make the first direct measurements of sea ice in the only area where sea ice is currently retreating in Antarctica. Until now, sea ice thickness was estimated through a combination of measurements of visible snow and ice depth above the sea surface; however scientists had remained unable to determine how much of it was snow and how much was ice. Snow radar provided by the University of Kansas and the laser Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) from NASA will now provide the first combined measurement of the layer cake' and the snow layer with an accuracy of about 5 cm (2 inches).
The farthest flight of the mission, on the other hand, was targeted at a portion of the circle of latitude at 86°S, an area intensively mapped by NASA's ICESat satellite. In remapping the points previously covered by ICESat with a Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS), scientists hope to improve the satellite data record and extend ice surface change observation into the future.
