Flying Alaska's Glaciers with Operation IceBridge
Narration: Kathleen Gaeta
Transcript:
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Ice.
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You might know that ice plays significant part in climate change.
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But what about how scientists study it?
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The first satellite solely dedicated to collecting information on the world’s ice
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was the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite, better known
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as ICESat. But back in 2009,
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ICESat was decommissioned, and ICESat-2 didn’t launch until nearly
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a decade later in 2018. So how did we study ice in the meantime?
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Enter Operation IceBridge.
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NASA’s Operation IceBridge was created to quite literally bridge
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the gap in data collection between satellites, and it’s the largest
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airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever.
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After 11 years of providing invaluable yearly measurements from both poles,
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surveying glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice, most of IceBridge came to
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a close. However, one small part of the mission
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still continues in 2020 -- Operation IceBridge
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Alaska. A team of scientists from the University
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of Alaska Fairbanks studies and records the annual changes in Alaska’s
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ice thickness. They do so through a remarkable aircraft.
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specially retrofitted for science. By shooting a laser
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out of the bottom of the plane that hits the glacier’s surface and bounces back up,
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scientists can measure the surface elevation. And using ice-penetrating
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radar, they can measure the bedrock below the glacier, and come up with
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an estimate of ice thickness. But the field missions in Alaska
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face especially challenging circumstances. In order
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to measure glaciers within data collection lines, the plane must be flown
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very low while navigating around extremely tricky mountain ranges,
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making for some of the most adventurous mission flying around.
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Even the glaciers themselves have proven to be a challenge to scientists.
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Most glaciers in Alaska are temperate, meaning
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they’re at their melting point from surface to base, and contain large pockets
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of water within the ice. Those pools of water muddle the
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radar signals, making it difficult to collect consistent measurements of
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thickness. And these measurements recorded are vital.
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Alaskan glaciers make up only a small percentage of the world’s ice,
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but they contribute a disproportionately large amount to sea level rise.
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The research and data collection done
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under Operation IceBridge helps give scientists a closer look at the
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connections between mountain glaciers and global climate change.
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EXPLORE EARTH
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NASA