Operation Ice

Operation Ice

IceBridge 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. These flights will provide a yearly, multi-instrument look at the behavior of the rapidly changing features of the Greenland and Antarctic ice.

Data collected during IceBridge will help scientists bridge the gap in polar observations between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — launched in 2003 and de-orbited in 2010 — and ICESat-2, planned for 2018. ICESat stopped collecting science data in 2009, making IceBridge critical for ensuring a continuous series of observations.

Greenland’s Inuit people have been living on the ice for thousands of years, but in the winter of 1963, they noticed glaciers melting in the winter for the first time. Decades later, a team of NASA scientists would be the first to prove that Greenland’s ice sheet was, in fact, melting. Now, during a time of unprecedented change in the Earth’s climate, NASA’s Operation IceBridge scientists are gathering data in Greenland to help the world understand how ice melt impacts people around the globe—most dramatically—by extreme weather events like the hurricanes of 2017.

 

IceBridge 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. These flights will provide a yearly, multi-instrument look at the behavior of the rapidly changing features of the Greenland and Antarctic ice.

Data collected during IceBridge will help scientists bridge the gap in polar observations between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — launched in 2003 and de-orbited in 2010 — and ICESat-2, planned for 2018. ICESat stopped collecting science data in 2009, making IceBridge critical for ensuring a continuous series of observations.

Greenland’s Inuit people have been living on the ice for thousands of years, but in the winter of 1963, they noticed glaciers melting in the winter for the first time. Decades later, a team of NASA scientists would be the first to prove that Greenland’s ice sheet was, in fact, melting. Now, during a time of unprecedented change in the Earth’s climate, NASA’s Operation IceBridge scientists are gathering data in Greenland to help the world understand how ice melt impacts people around the globe—most dramatically—by extreme weather events like the hurricanes of 2017.