This year, NASA’s surveying task of monitoring the changes in Arctic ice cover wrapped up on May 12th, 2017. Lake County News reported on May 20, 2017 that the surveying task, consisting of a series of flights, was greatly expanded this year.
Operation IceBridge
Operation IceBridge is NASA’s airborne mission to determine and monitor ice-cover changes at the Earth’s poles, and this year was its most ambitious campaign in the region. Petermann Glazier is one of the fastest-changing and largest glaciers in Greenland, and this year the survey included a rapid-response flight over a new crack in the Glazier.
By Jeremy Harbeck – NASA, Public Domain, Link
Beautiful Conditions for Surveying Sea Ice
Nathan Kurtz is a sea ice researcher and IceBridge’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. According to Kurtz, this has been their best year for surveying sea ice.
Geographically, a wider area was covered than ever before, and the instruments deployed during the campaign gave them more accurate and denser measurements.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean and, for the first time, IceBridge explored the Eurasian half of the Arctic Basin via research flights departing from Svalbard. During the mission they were able to take measurements of a crack which had recently formed on the ice shelf of Petermann Glazier.
An Extensive Mission
In total, 39 eight-hour flights were carried out in 10 weeks, and all IceBridge’s sea and land ice baseline flights were completed. 26 missions targeted land ice, while 13 missions focused on surveying sea ice.
It was on the 9th of March on-board NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility’s P-3 Orion aircraft that IceBridge’s first research flight occurred and, as usual, the initial mission was to overfly the sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, plus ever-changing land ice areas in Fairbanks in Alaska and Northwest Greenland’s Thule Air Base.
This year, they added another base – Longyearbyen in Svalbard. Now they were able to reach areas of the Eurasian side of the Arctic Ocean they had never explored before.
Preliminary Results
Kurtz said the preliminary analysing of data showed that, on the Eurasian side of the Arctic, the layer of snow on sea ice is thinner than predicted on snow depth climatology models. He added that these new snow measurements will enable them to better understand changes in sea ice cover in the Arctic, as well as ensuring that satellite measurements are accurate.
And another first for IceBridge was crossing the International Date Line, when they flew to the western side of the Chukchi Sea, located between Russia and Alaska.
Public Domain, Link
It was in mid-April while going through some satellite imagery that Stef Lhermitte from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands discovered a crack on the floating ice shelf of Petermann Glazier. NASA noted Lhermitte’s observations on Twitter, which was perfect timing because IceBridge was planning on flying one final mission over Petermann.
Scientists are intrigued by the new rift because, compared to other cracks, it’s further upstream from the front of the glacier, meaning that when it’s finished raging through the ice it could create a large iceberg, potentially making the glacier and the ice shelf itself, unstable. Whatever happens, these new measurements collected by IceBridge will be of enormous help to researchers in better understanding the evolution of cracks.
If you’d like more information about your own surveying project, contact Mandurah surveyor Greg Cole today.