Transcripts of OIB_en_Espanol_youtube



[wind noises] 

[music] Hello. My name’s María José Viñas and I am a science writer for NASA. I’m here in Greenland, in a town named Kangerlussuaq, accompanying a mission called IceBridge, or Puente de Hielo. This is the plane we use for our mission, a P-3B, which used to be a military plane that was readapted to be used for scientific missions. It’s equipped with a series of instruments that I will tell you about later. 

[music, aircraft noise] With IceBridge we fly this airplane quite close to the ground, at about 450 meters above the surface, and using a series of lasers and radars to observe how the ice sheet evolves from year to year. 

[music, aircraft noise] We do this twice a year: from October to December we go to Antarctica and from March til May we’re here in Greenland, measuring the Arctic ice sheet. For example, this morning we’ve flown over Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest melting glaciers in the world and we’ve measured how high it is this year, and we’ll compare this with data from previous years, to find out how much 

[of the glacier] has disappeared in one year. The P-3B carries a laser and four types of radar. The laser emits a pulse of light that bounces off the ice surface: the time that it takes for the light to return to the receivers installed in the body of the plane is indicative of the height of the ice sheet. The radars work in a similar way, but they use electromagnetic energy, which is able to penetrate the ice sheet and obtain information about its depth and structure. Two other instruments onboard the aircraft, called the gravetometer and magnetometer, analyze the geologic composition of the ground. Scientists study the data obtained during each IceBridge campaign and compare it to data from previous years, to calculate how the ice sheet changes from year to year. Here we are at the Russell Glacier, at the feet of Greenland’s ice sheet extending kilometers and kilometers into the interior of Greenland. And when you see this immensity is a bit hard to imagine disappear one day but that is what is happening right now, it's melting at a fast rate. And the IceBridge Mission is here to study these changes. 

[music]