Transcripts of Jakobshavn_2013_update_youtube_hq



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[aircraft noise] The Jakobshavn Glacier on the west coast of Greenland. It’s a familiar destination, but it certainly looks different every year. Yesterday Operation IceBridge  returned to the glacier for the first time in 2013, repeating a high priority mission they’ve now flown for five consecutive years, and and collected another trove of valuable data and some great images. What’s so special about Jakobshavn that keeps IceBridge and other researchers coming back? Well, it’s one of the fastest moving glaciers in Greenland, it produces more icebergs than any other northern glacier, and over the past 150 years it’s been retreating dramatically. Studying how glaciers like Jakobshavn are changing from year-to-year helps scientists get a handle on both the movement of the ice on a local scale, and ultimately how much these glaciers might contribute to sea level rise. While studying the upstream catchment area of the glacier – kind of like the drainage basin of a river – was the primary objective on yesterday’s flight, making a pass over the calving front of the glacier is always a highlight of the mission, as we can see from this video taken last year. Here we see two views of the calving front from this year… with laser elevation data above … and high-resolution photographic data below. And here’s a closer look at just how detailed that imagery is. IceBridge plans to be back in Jakobshavn next year. Past, present and future IceBridge flights over regions like this one are aimed at building a continuous record of change in Earth's polar regions to bridge the gap between NASA's ICESat satellite and ICESat-2, scheduled for launch in 2016. 

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