First Flight for NASA IceBridge Antarctic Mission

Airplanes conducting the IceBridge experiment for NASA managed to carry out the first flight of the 2010 season on October 27, after experiencing more than five days of delay due to unfavorable weather conditions.

The American space agency is conducting research in the Antarctic to analyze the extent and state of ice sheets and glaciers at the South Pole. These data are essential for understanding how global warming will affect the planet.

The first science sortie was a success, says science team member Michael Studinger. The heavily-modified DC-8 airplane that NASA uses for this mission remained airborne for 12 hours.

The goal of the six-year mission is to analyze ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice around the world, at both the North and South poles, and in Greenland.

If ices here melt entirely, then we could witness a massive rise in global sea levels that would threaten to affect some of the world's most populated cities with massive floods.

Metropolises such as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Rotterdam and others would be submerged under meters of water. This is how much ice the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland hold together.

But IceBridge is seeking to determine how these frozen masses respond to anthropogenic global warming, and the climate change it induces. The effects are clearly visible on mountaintop glaciers.

As the experiment unfolded over the years, the NASA team has visited numerous areas of interest, and this year they decided to study the Weddell Sea off the Antarctic Peninsula.

The science airplane flew over lines that were drawn based on the areas that were surveyed last year. Scientists took a sneak peak at an area extending from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to the area known as Cape Norvegia.

The thickness of the ice sheets below was measured using a type of optical remote-sensing technology called Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging), Our Amazing Planet reports.

“Lidars  were successfully used to record the surface elevation of the sea ice floes, which are largely overlain by snow at this time of year. Wide-band radars were successfully used to estimate the thickness of the snow cover,” explains expert Kenneth Jezek.

He is the science definition team co-leader, and he holds an appointment at the Ohio State University. “Knowledge of the combined sea ice/snow cover column ultimately can be used to estimate the sea ice thickness,” he concludes.