NASA’s Operation IceBridge Completes Eleven Years of Polar Surveys

  • Released Wednesday, December 11th, 2019
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:45PM
  • ID: 13501

Music:

Foraging At Dusk by Benjamin James Parsons [PRS]; Orchestra Groove by James Alexander Dorman [PRS]; Watching Ladybirds by Benjamin James Parsons [PRS]; Nanofiber by Andrew Michael Britton [PRS], David Stephen Goldsmith [PRS]

Complete transcript available.

For eleven years from 2009 to 2019, the planes of NASA’s Operation IceBridge flew above the Arctic, Antarctic and Alaska, gathering data on the height, depth, thickness, flow and change of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets.

Designed to collect data during the years between NASA’s two Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellites, ICESat and ICESat-2, IceBridge made its final polar flight in November 2019, one year after ICESat-2’s successful launch. The fleet of aircraft carried more than a dozen instruments, from elevation-mapping lasers and ice-penetrating radars to optical and infrared cameras. And the mission did much more than bridge the altimetry gap – it enabled many other discoveries, too, from diminishing snow cover over Arctic sea ice to impact craters hidden beneath Greenland’s ice.

As the team and planes move on to their next assignments, the scientists and engineers reflected on a decade of IceBridge’s most significant accomplishments.

Music: Galatic Shimmer by Anthony Edwin Phillips; Spiralling Spheres by Christopher Timothy; Scary Beasts and Midnight Feasts by Jody Karl Jenkins; First Time Buyer by Williamm David Featherby.

Complete transcript available.

For More Information

See https://icebridge.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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