NASA Heads to Arctic to Measure Ice

THE GIST:

• NASA is sending a team of scientists to Greenland to assess polar ice.
• The information will be fed into models used to predict how climate changes will impact Earth.
• These missions fill in the gap in data from the loss of NASA's ice-monitoring satellite.

NASA has a new tradition for the annual rites of spring: aerial assessments of Arctic sea ice, considered by many scientists to be ground zero for charting climate change.

"The polar regions are very sensitive to the changes in climate," said Michael Studinger, with the Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center at the University of Maryland. "Any kind of changes we see happening much sooner at the poles than at any other latitude."

Studinger is among a 35-member team of scientists, engineers, technicians and aircraft crew arriving in Greenland on Monday for a planned five-week field trip to collect information about polar ice. The campaign, called IceBridge, follows a similar expedition to Antarctica last October and November.

The missions, which are conducted aboard aircraft, are intended to replace data collected by an ice-monitoring satellite that failed last year. NASA plans to keep IceBridge going until a replacement spacecraft, called ICESat-2, is launched in 2015. ICESat is an acronym for Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite.

The team was able to survey Arctic sea ice last year before ICESat's shutdown, which allowed researchers to calibrate information collected by the airborne instruments with the satellite data. Continuity is critical, since the point of the project is to assess on an annual basis changes in the amount and thickness of polar ice.

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"We need to understand how the climate of Earth will respond in the future," Studinger told Discovery News. "It's a critical data set for computer models which are used to predict the sea level rise and temperature changes."

Laser measurements of Arctic ice since the early 1990s show the major edges of Greenland have been thinning, said NASA's Lora Koenig, with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "There also has been a decrease in the expanse of ice."

The latest campaign begins with a NASA DC-8 aircraft outfitted with two lasers, three radars, a high-resolution video camera and a gravity-measuring device that will be used to measure the depth of water beneath an iceberg.

"A lot of glaciers are floating. We don't know how much water they're floating in, or the shape of the water cavity," Studinger said.

The measurements are important because warm water in Greenland's fjords is believed to contribute to the rapid melting of ice from below, he added.

The IceBridge team plans to overfly parts of Greenland previously studied, as well as new areas, particularly in the southeast, which is becoming more dynamic. The melting of some glaciers there has been accelerated, while others in the area have gotten thicker. In the northwest, once stable glaciers are beginning to thin, NASA says.