Ice, Ice, Baby

Just back from Greenland, the team is on to new adventures, new projects, and new ideas. But that doesn't change one profound truth: what an extraordinary trip! NASA's IceBridge mission continues to conduct profoundly important-- and profoundly challenging--research about what's happening to Earth's climate. The work takes place far away from ordinary life, with limited creature comfort, and even more limited contact with rhythms of days left behind. It was a privlidge to travel with this extraordinary team, and it will be our great privlidge to do so again someday.

Below you'll find a few links to videos produced on location. The production conditions were tough in every way, but the work was the adventure of a lifetime.

All about NASA's IceBridge P-3B plane and its IceBridge retrofit. Upgraded with 21st century "special modifications", the aircraft is less a cold war relic and more like the Space Agency's Millennium Falcon. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This video shows what the IceBridge team does on a day-to-day basis in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, the base of operations for the mission's April 2014 flights. IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission, is the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown. It will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice.

Determining whether polar ice quantities are growing or shrinking requires accurate and detailed measurements, year over year. To help make those measurements, IceBridge mission aircraft fire 3,000 pulses of laser light every second at the frozen landscape below. Scientists time how long it takes for the reflected pulses to make it back to the aircraft.