Pre-mission video transcript

Narration: Michelle Williams

Transcript:

[music] [Narrator] NASA's Operation IceBridge mission, the largest airborne survey of earth's polar ice ever flown, kicks off its second year with the arrival of two NASA aircraft next week in Greenland. The team will spend two hundred hours in the air gathering data using a suite of instruments that peer below some of the region's critical glaciers. IceBridge is aptly named as it will bridge the data gap between the loss of NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat and the launch of ICESat-II, planned for 2015. [Sonntag] I think it's probably safe to say if it weren't for Operation IceBridge, or similar efforts, that the global science community would lose a lot of its knowledge about what's going on with Greenland and Antarctica as a whole. [Narrator] Two hundred hours in the air require a lot of work on the ground. Engineers have been outfitting NASA's DC-8 and P-3B aircraft with an array of science instruments. IceBridge planes will re-survey previous ICESat tracks to get a sense of how Arctic ice is changing. [Sonntag] I think the last thing that NASA would like to see is to take a snapshot of the ice at the end of the ICESat-I operational period, get another snapshot at the beginning of ICESat-II and have no idea of what happened in between. And that's essentially what IceBridge is about, is filling in that gap of knowledge. [Blair] If you want to look at areas that are very dynamic, like a glacial region that actually a lot of ice is moving through and there's a lot of vertical changes, we can map that entire area and capture the full spatial variability of that change, which is really a good indication of the mechanics of how that change is happening. [Sonntag] Greenland, because of its presence, and Antarctica, all the ice masses together act as a buffer on climate. And so if they were to start to melt, which many people believe that they are, then the eventual effect will be a warmer climate overall. [Narrator] Annual spring missions over the Arctic and fall missions over Antarctica will allow scientists to track changes in polar ice thickness and extent so we have a better picture of ice dynamics and future sea level rise.

END.