Transcripts of OIB_Across_the_Ross_youtube_hq



[whoosh, laser sound] 

[music] 

[music] 

[At the Operation IceBridge team got the weather briefing they were hoping to hear: The Ross Sea had unusually clear skies, and so the first ever basin-wide laser and radar survey of this critical area was officially a go. "It should be good all day. Yeah, but like you said, this has been pretty ugly for quite a while so." "Yeah, it has. And that's a baseline mission." Three hours later, the NASA P-3 aircraft was on the move, taking off from the sea ice runway at McMurdo Station, and heading to its science target. The particular flight paths for the Ross Sea Fluxgate mission were chosen to sample the movement, or flux, of flows of sea ice moving northward from the coast. A few hours into the mission, the team encountered large icebergs that had broken off of nearby ice sheets, as well as many cracks of open ocean water, or leads, in the sea ice. These leads generated moisture in the air, causing localized fog and low cloud cover, but nothing the team’s instruments couldn’t handle. The leads also make a good science target because measuring the local sea surface height enables researchers to estimate the thickness of the sea ice above and below the water. The Ross Sea is particularly important to study since it’s one of the few places where sea ice coverage has been, on average, increasing over the last few decades. IceBridge thickness data should help illuminate whether that increased area actually represents a greater total volume of ice as well. 

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