14 DAY TRIAL // The American space agency announces that its researchers will soon set out to the Antarctic, ready to begin the fourth year of investigations in project IceBridge. This year's sortie is part of a six-year effort to study what is currently happening at the Earth's poles.
Determining the state of the polar caps is a very complex issue, and determining how exactly global warming and climate change affects them is very difficult to do.
This is precisely why NASA is conducting such a long-term investigation into the issue, in hope of making sense of the mechanisms that act at the poles today, to prompt ice sheet decline.
Polar ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are all kept under close observations throughout the annual IceBridge expeditions, Our Amazing Planet reports.
The entire survey is conducted from aboard an airplane, which boasts an impressive suite of scientific instruments. The tools can create 3D images of Arctic and Antarctic ices in unprecedented levels of detail.
The multi-perspective look these instruments provide on the rapidly-changing behavior of features of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets is invaluable to science, experts say.
“We are going to be flying over the lines that ICESat did in order to continue collecting information as it would have, but we are going to be able to get a better picture of what is happening with the ice,” explains Tom Wagner.
“While ICESat only had one laser, our plane is outfitted with multiple lasers which will help us create a more accurate image of the ice,” adds the expert, who is a NASA cryosphere program mission scientist.
The new observations campaign will be based in Punta Arenas, Chile. NASA announces that it will begin flying the sorties out over the Antarctic over the next couple of days.
The Antarctic Peninsula, the Wedell Sea, the Amundsen Sea and the Amundsen Sea Coast are the main targets of investigation this year, because this is where last year's campaign left off.
“Flights over sea ice are designed to measure the surface elevation of the sea ice floes above the adjacent water level from which, using buoyancy, ice thickness can be estimated,” Kenneth Jezek adds.
“Thickness is important because sea ice is an important moderator of the heat flux from the relatively warm polar ocean to the cold polar atmosphere,” he adds.
Jezek is the science definition team co-leader for the new mission, and he holds an appointment at the Ohio State University (OSU).
“These ice shelves have long been believed to be diagnostic of warming signals in the Antarctic and have indeed been retreating since the late 1980s,” he says.
“The information is important because loss of the ice shelves precipitate an increase in ice flux from the interior glaciers into the ocean, thus raising sea level,” the expert concludes.
The investigation is being conducted from aboard a heavily modified DC8 airplane. The team plans to carry out 145 observation hours above the Antarctic this year.