Antarctica’s ice being studied for third year

Scientists with Nasa’s Operation IceBridge airborne research campaign began the mission’s third year of surveys over the changing ice of Antarctica.

Researchers are flying a suite of scientific instruments on two planes from a base of operations in Punta Arenas, Chile: A DC-8 operated by Nasa and a Gulfstream V operated by the National Science Foundation and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

Ninety-eight per cent of Antarctica is covered with ice. Scientists are concerned about how quickly key features are thinning, such as Pine Island Glacier, which rests on bedrock below sea level. Better understanding this type of change is crucial to projecting impacts like sea-level rise.

“With a third year of data-gathering under way, we are starting to build our own record of change,” said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md.

“With IceBridge, our aim is to understand what the world’s major ice sheets could contribute to sea-level rise. To understand that you have to record how ice sheets and glaciers are changing over time.”

IceBridge science flights put a variety of remote-sensing instruments above Antarctica’s land and sea ice, and in some regions, above the ocean floor.

The G-V carries one instrument: a laser-ranging topography mapper. The DC-8 carries seven instruments, including a laser altimeter to continue the crucial ice sheet elevation record begun by the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission, which ended in 2009.

The flying laboratory also will carry radars that can distinguish how much snow sits on top of sea ice and map the terrain of bedrock below thick ice cover.