&#9828;&#9828;&#9828; A VUELO DE UN QUINDE&#174; , EL BLOG! &#9831;&#9831;&#9831;

http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge

Incríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

viernes, 3 de abril de 2015

NASA : Operation IceBridge Debuts Its Seventh Arctic Campaign .- Operación IceBridge estrena su séptima campaña al Ártico

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., hemos recibido información de la Agencia Espacial NASA en sus investigaciones del Ártico, que lleva a cabo con su nave: NASA's Operation IceBridge, cuyo avión NASA's C-130 aircraft: Ha desarrollado la Operación IceBridge de la NASA, un estudio aéreo de los hielos polares, completó con éxito su primer vuelo de investigación de Groenlandia 19 de marzo de 2015, lanzando así su séptima campaña del Ártico. Vuelos de ciencias de este año más de marino en el Ártico y el hielo terrestre continuarán hasta el 22 de mayo

NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, successfully completed its first Greenland research flight of 2015 on March 19, thus launching its seventh Arctic campaign. This year’s science flights over Arctic sea and land ice will continue until May 22.

The C-130 aircraft getting readied for pressurization tests on March 16, 2015 at Wallops.

NASA's C-130 aircraft getting readied for pressurization tests on March16, 2015 at Wallops Flight Facility, during preparation for the Arctic 2015 Operation IceBridge field campaign. The mission¹s usual research aircraft in the Arctic, a P-3, is currently getting new wings.

Image Credit:

NASA/Jefferson Beck

The mission of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions. The original ICESat mission ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2017. Operation IceBridge, which began in in 2009, is currently funded until 2019. The planned two-year overlap with ICESat-2 will help scientists validate the satellite’s measurements.

The extensive data IceBridge has gathered over the Greenland ice sheet during its six years of operations have provided an improved picture of the surface, the bed and the internal structures of Greenland’s ice sheet and allowed scientists to create more accurate models of glacier contribution to sea level rise. As for sea ice, IceBridge’s measurements of the thickness of sea ice and its snow cover have assisted in improving forecasts for summertime melt, enhanced the understanding of variations in ice thickness distribution from year to year, and updated the climatology of the snow depth over sea ice.

The first part of the Arctic campaign, based in the Thule Air Base in northern Greenland and including a short deployment to Fairbanks, Alaska, will focus on the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland and in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas north of Alaska.

“As far as the sea ice flight lines go in the Arctic this year, the new thing is that we’re not changing things this year,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, IceBridge science team co-lead and sea ice researcher with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. “We’ve achieved a pattern of survey flights that is doing its job: it provides good insight into what the thickness distribution of the Arctic cover looks like in the Western Arctic, late in the winter season. This coverage is good both for modelers that are looking to do a prediction of the seasonal extent of the ice cover through the following summer and it also pays a nice complement to the satellite coverage that we’re getting from ESA’s [European Space Agency] CryoSat-2 satellite.”

This year, one of IceBridge’s radar instruments, the Multi-Channel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS), which is operated by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, will try for the first time to take direct measurements of sea ice thickness. Thickness is a key indicator of Arctic sea ice’s likelihood to survive the summer melt season, but remote measurements of this characteristic are largely indirect.

“It would really be a wonderful thing to get direct measurements of sea ice thickness because what we have now is an inferred measurement based on how much sea ice is floating above open water”, Richter-Menge said. “Direct measurements would increase the level of certainty in the data.”

Youtube Override:

NASA’s Operation IceBridge is back in the field, with a twist. Instead of using the P-3 or DC-8 aircraft from previous campaigns, they’ve outfitted a C-130 cargo plane for the trip. Science flights begin this week as the mission studies Arctic sea ice, ice caps, glaciers, and the Greenland Ice Sheet

Image Credit:

NASA/Goddard

Feature Link:

› Download video

The second part of the Operation IceBridge’s 2015 Arctic campaign will be based in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and it will focus on surveying ice surface elevation and thickness at several rapidly changing points of the Greenland ice sheet. Afterward, the team will return to Thule for the last phase of the field campaign.

This year, four areas have been added to the list of Operation IceBridge’s high priority missions. Among these are the Zachariae Isstrom glacier in northeast Greenland and its neighbor to the north, the 79 N or Nioghalvfjerdsbrae glacier. Both of these rivers of ice have rapidly increased the rates in which they drain land ice to the ocean in the past years.

“That part of Greenland is changing very rapidly and corresponds to a basin below sea level pretty far inland,” said Eric Rignot, IceBridge science team co-lead and glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “It’s a sector that we’re paying close attention to because it has the potential to change rapidly and it could have a significant implication for sea level rise in the coming decades.”

“As we do every year, we are sampling the four corners of Greenland and the interior regions to complete a rather extensive survey of the ice sheet,” Rignot said. “Recent results have shown that this type of survey is good enough to keep track of the total mass loss of the ice sheet from year to year, and also to get details on glaciers that are key players in driving the mass loss to higher values every year.”

Operation IceBridge is using a different research aircraft this year, an adapted C-130 Hercules former military plane. The mission’s usual ride in the Arctic, a P-3, is getting new wings. Despite both planes having similar sizes and capabilities, mounting IceBridge’s array of lasers and radars on an unfamiliar fuselage doesn’t come without challenges.

“Any time we install our very extensive suite of sensors, they have to be integrated in the aircraft, which means mechanically mounted in good, stiff mounts, and the radar antennas have to be embedded within the fuselage so that they function adequately without requiring time-consuming aerodynamic modifications to the aircraft,” said John Sonntag, Operation IceBridge’s Field Team Lead. “It takes a lot of time and mechanical work to get the sensors mounted on the aircraft and to get the electrical interfaces with the crew and the cockpit”.

As in previous years, Operation IceBridge will be collaborating with several international research initiatives. In Barrow, Alaska, the C-130 will overfly a sea ice experiment by the Naval Research Laboratory. In a remote outpost in the northeastern Greenland coast, IceBridge will take measurements overlapping those taken from the ground by researchers from the University of Manitoba, Canada. And, weather permitting, NASA’s airborne polar laboratory will fly over a drifting sea ice station in the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and Svalbard that is the primary region of sea ice export from the Arctic.

“The purpose of our cooperations with other research groups is to understand our own instruments better by comparison to the measurements they’re collecting on the ground, primarily snow depth and sea ice thickness,” Sonntag said. “ We use their detailed measurements collected on the ground to better understand the geographically much wider, but in some cases less detailed measurements we take from the air.”

The IceBridge project science office is based at Goddard. The C-130 research aircraft is based at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. For more about Operation IceBridge and to follow this year's campaign, visit:

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

domingo, 9 de noviembre de 2014

NASA: Glaciers and Mountains in West Antarctica .- Las montañas y los glaciares de la Antártida Occidental

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., la Agencia Espacial NASA, nos informa que : "Los glaciares y las montañas en el sol de la tarde se ven en una investigación vuelo Operación IceBridge, al regresar de la Antártida Occidental el 29 de octubre de 2014..................
La NASA está llevando a su sexto año consecutivo en octubre de vuelos de investigación Operación IceBridge sobre la Antártida para estudiar los cambios en la capa de hielo del continente, los glaciares y el hielo marino. La campaña de este año vuelve a visitar la sección de aire de la Antártida . Que la capa de hielo recientemente se encontró que era de declive irreversible................

IceBridge utiliza un conjunto de instrumentos incluye altímetro láser que, instrumentos de radar, cámaras, y un gravímetro, que es un instrumento que detecta pequeños cambios en la gravedad. Estos pequeños cambios revelan la cantidad de glaciares han perdido masa Estes. Los investigadores planean medida calculada previamente inexploradas regiones de la Antártida, como las partes superiores de Smith glaciar en la Antártida Occidental, que es el adelgazamiento más rápido que cualquier otro de los glaciares de la región. La misión también tiene previsto recopilar datos en partes de la Península Antártica, como la Larsen C, George VI y Wilkins plataformas de hielo y los glaciares drenan en em Que. El calentamiento de la Península Antártica ha sido el más rápido que el resto del continente.................

Back to Gallery

Glaciers and Mountains in West Antarctica

Glaciers and mountains in the evening sun are seen on an Operation IceBridge research flight, returning from West Antarctica on Oct. 29, 2014.

NASA is carrying out its sixth consecutive year of Operation IceBridge research flights over Antarctica to study changes in the continent’s ice sheet, glaciers and sea ice. This year’s airborne campaign revisits a section of the Antarctic ice sheet that recently was found to be in irreversible decline.

IceBridge uses a suite of instruments that includes a laser altimeter, radar instruments, cameras, and a gravimeter, which is an instrument that detects small changes in gravity. These small changes reveal how much mass these glaciers have lost. Researchers plan to measure previously unsurveyed regions of Antarctica, such as the upper portions of Smith Glacier in West Antarctica, which is thinning faster than any other glaciers in the region. The mission also plans to collect data in portions of the Antarctic Peninsula, such as the Larsen C, George VI and Wilkins ice shelves and the glaciers that drain into them. The Antarctic Peninsula has been warming faster than the rest of the continent.

In addition to extending the data record of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped collecting data in 2009, IceBridge will also help set the stage for ICESat-2 by measuring ice the satellite will fly over.

> Operation IceBridge Antarctic 2014 Campaign

Image Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

sábado, 6 de septiembre de 2014

NASA : NASA-UCI Study Indicates Loss of West Antarctic Glaciers Appears Unstoppable

Glaciers in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea Embayment have “passed the point of no return” according to new research based on three different lines of evidence.

Image Credit:

NASA/Eric Rignot

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica "have passed the point of no return," according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.

"This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said. "A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea."

Three major lines of evidence point to the glaciers' eventual demise: the changes in their flow speeds, how much of each glacier floats on seawater, and the slope of the terrain they are flowing over and its depth below sea level. In a paper in April, Rignot’s research group discussed the steadily increasing flow speeds of these glaciers over the past 40 years. This new study examines the other two lines of evidence.

The glaciers flow out from land to the ocean, with their leading edges afloat on the seawater. The point on a glacier where it first loses contact with land is called the grounding line. Nearly all glacier melt occurs on the underside of the glacier beyond the grounding line, on the section floating on seawater.

Just as a grounded boat can float again on shallow water if it is made lighter, a glacier can float over an area where it used to be grounded if it becomes lighter, which it does by melting or by the thinning effects of the glacier stretching out. The Antarctic glaciers studied by Rignot's group have thinned so much they are now floating above places where they used to sit solidly on land, which means their grounding lines are retreating inland.

"The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot said. “This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."

The team used radar observations captured between 1992 and 2011 by the European Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1 and -2) satellites to map the grounding lines' retreat inland. The satellites use a technique called radar interferometry, which enables scientists to measure very precisely -- within less than a quarter of an inch -- how much Earth's surface is moving. Glaciers move horizontally as they flow downstream, but their floating portions also rise and fall vertically with changes in the tides. Rignot and his team mapped how far inland these vertical motions extend to locate the grounding lines.

The accelerating flow speeds and retreating grounding lines reinforce each other. As glaciers flow faster, they stretch out and thin, which reduces their weight and lifts them farther off the bedrock. As the grounding line retreats and more of the glacier becomes waterborne, there's less resistance underneath, so the flow accelerates.

Slowing or stopping these changes requires pinning points -- bumps or hills rising from the glacier bed that snag the ice from underneath. To locate these points, researchers produced a more accurate map of bed elevation that combines ice velocity data from ERS-1 and -2 and ice thickness data from NASA's Operation IceBridge mission and other airborne campaigns. The results confirm no pinning points are present upstream of the present grounding lines in five of the six glaciers. Only Haynes Glacier has major bedrock obstructions upstream, but it drains a small sector and is retreating as rapidly as the other glaciers.

The bedrock topography is another key to the fate of the ice in this basin. All the glacier beds slope deeper below sea level as they extend farther inland. As the glaciers retreat, they cannot escape the reach of the ocean, and the warm water will keep melting them even more rapidly.

The accelerating flow rates, lack of pinning points and sloping bedrock all point to one conclusion, Rignot said.

"The collapse of this sector of West Antarctica appears to be unstoppable," he said. "The fact that the retreat is happening simultaneously over a large sector suggests it was triggered by a common cause, such as an increase in the amount of ocean heat beneath the floating sections of the glaciers. At this point, the end of this sector appears to be inevitable."

Because of the importance of this part of West Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge will continue to monitor its evolution closely during this year's Antarctica deployment, which begins in October. IceBridge uses a specialized fleet of research aircraft and the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever assembled to characterize changes in thickness of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice.

For additional images and video related to this new finding, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/1m6YZSf

For additional information on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to sea level rise, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/1oIfSlO

For more information on Operation IceBridge, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

miércoles, 21 de mayo de 2014

NASA : Hidden Greenland Canyons Mean More Sea Level Rise

Youtube Override:

New maps of the bedrock beneath Greenland’s ice sheet (right) have found long, deep canyons that are likely to cause ocean-feeding glaciers (left) to retreat faster and farther inland than previously thought.

Image Credit: NASA

Scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have found that canyons under Greenland's ocean-feeding glaciers are deeper and longer than previously thought, increasing the amount of Greenland's estimated contribution to future sea level rise.

"The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated, and for much longer, according to this very different topography we have discovered,” said Mathieu Morlighem, a UCI associate project scientist who is lead author of the new research paper. The results were published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Ice loss from Greenland has accelerated during the last few decades. However, older ice sheet models predicted the speedup would be temporary because the glaciers would soon melt back onto higher ground and stabilize. The models projected that Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise would therefore be limited.

Morlighem's new topography shows southern Greenland's ragged, crumbling coastline is scored by more than 100 canyons beneath glaciers that empty into the ocean. Many canyons are well below sea level as far as 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland. Higher ground, where glaciers could stabilize, is much farther from the coastline than previously thought. The finding calls into question the idea that the recent accelerated ice loss will be short lived.

Buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet, the subcontinent's bedrock topography has been estimated using soundings from ice-penetrating radar. However, the wet and fractured ice along the southern coastline cluttered the radar soundings so that large swaths of the bed remained invisible. To overcome that problem, Morlighem and his colleagues devised an advanced technique to create a more accurate map. The technique makes the best use of several kinds of data: ice thickness measurements derived from airborne radar; satellite radar interferometry data on the speed and direction of ice movement: and estimates of snowfall and surface melt to the sea. By combining the different types of data, they were able to map the bed topography along Greenland's margins with unprecedented precision and detail.

"We have been able to make a quantum leap in our knowledge of bed topography beneath ice sheets in the last decade, thanks to the advent of missions like NASA's Operation IceBridge in combination with satellite data on the speed these ice sheets are flowing," said coauthor Eric Rignot of UCI and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California.

The same research team reported new findings on glacial melt in West Antarctica last week.

"Together the papers illustrate clearly the globe’s ice sheets will contribute far more to sea level rise than current projections show,” said Rignot.

The study used synthetic aperture radar data collected in 2008-2009 by the Japanese Advanced Land Observing System Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS PALSAR), the Canadian RADARSAT-1, the German TerraSAR-X, and the European Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). Ice thinning rates were derived from NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper and ICESat data, and ice thickness data came from NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne campaigns.

An animation of the newly mapped bed topography is available at:

http://youtu.be/g_6a7SloMsY

The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@Hotmail.com

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

lunes, 12 de mayo de 2014

NASA : NASA-UCI Study Indicates Loss of West Antarctic Glaciers Appears Unstoppable

Glaciers in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea Embayment have “passed the point of no return” according to new research based on three different lines of evidence.

Image Credit:

NASA/Eric Rignot

The accelerating flow rates, lack of pinning points and sloping bedrock all point to one conclusion, Rignot said.

For additional images and video related to this new finding, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/1m6YZSf

For additional information on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to sea level rise, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/1oIfSlO

For more information on Operation IceBridge, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

miércoles, 12 de marzo de 2014

NASA : NASA's Operation IceBridge Begins New Arctic Campaign

The NASA P-3 leaving the hangar at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on the morning of March 10, 2014.

The NASA P-3 leaving the hangar at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on the morning of March 10 in preparation for the flight to Thule Air Base, Greenland.

Image Credit: NASA/Patrick Black

Researchers aboard NASA's P-3 research aircraft left the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., March 10 for Greenland to begin a new season of collecting data on Arctic land and sea ice.

The mission, known as Operation IceBridge, is to gather data on changes to polar ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions. The original ICESat mission ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2017.

By flying yearly campaigns, IceBridge provides valuable data on rapidly changing areas of polar land and sea ice. Flights run through May 23 from Thule Air Base and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, with a week-long deployment to Fairbanks, Alaska.

Five new NASA Earth science missions are launching in 2014 to expand our understanding of Earth’s changing climate and environment.

Over the past five years, IceBridge has surveyed large portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, as well as sea ice in both polar regions. IceBridge data have been used to build detailed maps of bedrock in Greenland and Antarctica, calculate changes in Arctic sea ice thickness and volume, and improve our understanding of the rate at which glaciers in Greenland are flowing into the sea.

The first part of the campaign will focus on sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland and in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas north of Alaska. As in the past two years, IceBridge will provide data on ice thickness to help sea ice researchers develop more accurate seasonal Arctic sea ice models.

The remainder of the campaign will turn to measuring ice surface elevation and thickness at many of the Greenland Ice Sheet's outlet glaciers, which are channels of ice that flow from an ice sheet, constrained on its sides by bedrock. The surface elevation measurements taken by IceBridge's laser altimeter, the Airborne Topographic Mapper, will provide scientists data on how the ice sheet is changing and give a useful benchmark for ICESat-2.

Radar instruments such as the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, which is operated by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., will peer beneath the surface to collect the data on ice thickness and sub-ice terrain, internal layering in the ice sheet and snow depth.

The P-3 research aircraft's extensive instrument suite features a new component this year –
a spectrometer that measures ice albedo, or reflectivity.

"A small change in albedo over the entire Arctic could have a significant effect on how much heat is absorbed by the surface," said Nathan Kurtz, a sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This year's flights will serve as a preliminary test for the instrument.

Throughout the campaign, the IceBridge team will coordinate its efforts with other research groups working in the region. Researchers on the surface will study sea ice and snow thickness near Barrow, Alaska, in the Canadian Basin and just north of Greenland. Measurements in these areas will later be used to further verify the accuracy of IceBridge's snow radar instrument, particularly in areas with rough ice surfaces.

Panoramic view of Thule Air Base, Greenland, on Mar. 10, 2014.

Image Credit: NASA / Christy Hansen

According to Jackie Richter-Menge, sea ice scientist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., snow radar works well on ice that has not been deformed. Ice with a rougher surface can scatter radar waves, making the returning signal harder to interpret.

The IceBridge team also will work with the CryoVEx (CryoSat-2 Validation Experiment) team, which operates a campaign to verify measurements made by the European Space Agency's ice-monitoring satellite, CryoSat-2, in orbit since 2010. The IceBridge team plans to fly directly beneath the orbit of CryoSat-2 around the same time the satellite passes overhead to compare measurements. Researchers from the European Space Agency, York University in Toronto, Canada, and the Technical University of Denmark also will be flying airborne instruments to measure ice and snow.

"It's really exciting to have all of these people working together," said Richter-Menge. "It shows how interested everyone is in advancing these measurements."

Three high school science teachers from the United States, Denmark and Greenland also will join IceBridge and fly with the team to get first-hand experience and knowledge they can bring back to their classrooms. These teachers come to IceBridge through partnerships with the U.S.-Denmark-Greenland Joint Committee and PolarTREC, a U.S.-based program that pairs teachers with polar research expeditions.

For more about Operation IceBridge and to follow this year's campaign, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge

For more about PolarTREC and the IceBridge teacher research experience, visit:

http://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/airborne-survey-of-polar-ice-2014

For more about the U.S.-Denmark-Greenland Joint Committee, visit:

http://denmark.usembassy.gov/gl/jc.html

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

Inscríbete en el Foro del blog y participa : A Vuelo De Un Quinde - El Foro!

domingo, 17 de noviembre de 2013

NASA : NASA Begins First Antarctic Airborne Campaign from McMurdo Station

P-3B sits in front of Mount Erebus in Antarctica.

NASA's P-3 airborne laboratory on the sea ice ramp at the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station in Antarctica with Mount Erebus, one of Antarctica's active volcanoes, in the background.

Image Credit: NASA / George Hale

Image Token:

NASA's Operation IceBridge has begun its 2013 Antarctic field campaign with the arrival of the agency's aircraft and scientists at the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

The IceBridge mission will conduct daily survey flights through Nov. 26 on a NASA P-3 research aircraft from a base of operations at McMurdo Station. The P-3 usually is based at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. As part of a multi-year project, researchers are collecting data on Antarctic land and sea ice. Previous IceBridge Antarctic missions were conducted out of Punta Arenas, Chile.

"Flying from Antarctica will allow us to survey areas that had been unreachable from Chile," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "There are many scientifically important areas we can now reach from McMurdo."

One such area is the Siple Coast on the edge of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. The ice streams there are of particular interest. "We know from spaceborne ice surface velocity measurements that some of the Siple Coast ice streams are changing," said Studinger. "But since 2009, we have had no laser altimeter measurements of ice surface elevations in this area."

Michael Studinger (left) and Christy Hansen (right), walk beneath the wing of the parked P-3

Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist (left) and Christy Hansen, IceBridge project manager, walk beneath the wing of the parked P-3 at McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

Image Credit: NASA/George Hale

Image Token:

In 2009, NASA's ice-monitoring satellite, the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) reached the end of its life and stopped collecting data. IceBridge was started the same year and will keep an eye on changing polar ice until NASA launches the ICESat successor (ICESat-2) in three years.

IceBridge also plans to fly over areas of sea ice in and around the Ross Sea where there have been no airborne ice thickness measurements. The scientists will also survey beneath the Ross Ice Shelf using a gravimeter, an instrument that can detect minute changes in gravitational fields below the aircraft. These small changes help researchers determine the depth and shape of water cavities beneath floating ice.

The P-3 left Wallops Nov. 11 carrying a suite of instruments, including laser altimeters, radars, cameras and gravity and magnetic field sensors. The IceBridge team also has set up ground stations at McMurdo to collect global positioning system data.

Mission planners worked with the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Antarctic Program for more than a year laying the groundwork for this campaign. The IceBridge project science office is located at Goddard.

For more information on Operation IceBridge, visit:

www.nasa.gov/icebridge
NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui