NASA’s Ice Bridge Team Heads To Antarctica, Where It’s Warm

By Julianne LaJeunesse – University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News Service

NASA will fly its 157 foot DC-8 laboratory aircraft south for some of the winter, where officials hope to use radar and airborne and imaging lasers to collect and record changes to sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers. NASA says that all of these are experiencing the effects of warming in some areas, and snow and ice accumulation in others.

“Our motivation in these aircraft observations, is based on our concern about the contributions of the ice sheets to sea level rise,” said Seeyle Martin, the chief scientist of Operation Ice Bridge, which is a six-year effort by NASA to fly to each of the earth’s polar regions each year.

Martin added that NASA surveyed Greenland in the 1990’s and found that ice mass loss is increasing by 7 percent each year. However, said Martin, “we do not have a comparable number for Antarctica.”

The Operation Ice Bridge team will be based in Punta Arenas, Chile through mid-November, where they will make up to 17 flights, passing in and out of West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and the Southern Ocean.

Tom Wagner, a cryosphere program scientist at NASA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, said in a NASA press release that the team will use equipment which he called “the only way to find out where change is occurring in remote continent-sized ice sheets like Antarctica.”

That equipment includes NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation satellite laser, which will be used before using the Airborne Topographic Mapper. When the equipment is used collaboratively, scientists will be able to calibrate the data that satellite alone cannot map. The NASA team will also use radar depth sounding to measure ice sheet thickness, a laser vegetation imaging sensor, a snow radar, and a gravimeter, which will measure the changes in gravity the team expects to encounter at the edges of the Pines Island Bay.

Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University, said that the Ice Bridge endeavor is unique and will answer many questions about why ice sheets are changing.

“Ice Bridge is going to allow us to look at the base of the ice sheets, where the warm ocean water is reaching the bottom of the ice sheet, and where those… glaciers may actually be lubricated by water,” she said.