Transcripts of OIB2012pt1_Youtube

 

[music, titles] Narrator: IceBridge is off to a strong start this year, having completed seven science missions over outlet glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets and covering a broad range of territory both east and west This is exactly the kind of start mission managers were hoping for when they were preparing the aircraft thousands of miles away in California, two weeks ago. Cutler: Dryden has been invited by Headquarters to play a pretty major in Operation IceBridge when it come to studying the Antarctic contininent. So we prepare the DC-8 with numerous instruments to fly long duration flights out of Punta Arenas, Chile. For this year's campaign we've got a complement of about 17 scientists will be flying on board, and we've got seven instruments installed, and they rage from a lidar to radars, to a gravity meter as well which is kind of a unique instrument. And at the end of the campaign when we've flown hopefully 15 stories, if we've hit the targets and they successfully collected data, then we know that we've done a good job. Studinger: So this is the fourth year that we're going back to Antarctica with the DC-8. And we have analyzed the data from previous flights and previous missions and we see that the ice sheets for example, like Pine Island Glacier, are rapidly thinning. And the thinning is accelerating and it's spreading further and further inland so this is something we really have to keep an eye on and go back every year in order to make sure that we collect the data that we need to feed into computer models that allow us to make predictions for the future. Narrator: Until today, the mission had yet to feature a return to the site of last year’s discovery of a massive rift in the Pine Island Glacier, a huge flow of ice that has been called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice sheet. Satellite images show the glacier has not calved yet, but when it does, could produce an iceberg the size of New York City. Keep in mind that the main science objective of Operation IceBridge is to study how ice is changing in polar regions on a much broader scale, not searching out calving events. But being at the right place at the right provided a scientific bonus. Brunt: IceBridge did a great job of surveying that crack and giving us a great visual of rift dynamics. I mean the ice melange that is in that rift is very interesting. IceBridge is based out of Chile to fly all sorts of flight lines associated with bridging the gap between ICESat and ICESat2. They happened to survey it last year, just fortuitously It would be awesome if they could go back for sure. It wouldn't be directly their science but it would be great to see the evolution of that rift or possibly even a new survey associated with the new calving front. Narrator: Today’s mission featured a rare high altitude flight over the Pine Island Glacier. As the aircraft returns, we wait for news of what the team found when they got there. 

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