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Leopard seals are pagophilic mammals, meaning they prefer to live on or near sea ice and depend on it for many activities and functions. ©
INKTOBER
Day 23: Rust.
Day 24: Expedition.
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Earth’s Land Ice by the Numbers
“At a glacial pace” used to mean moving so slowly the movement is almost imperceptible. Lately though, glaciers are moving faster. Ice on land is melting and flowing, sending water to the oceans, where it raises sea levels.
In 2018, we launched the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) to continue a global record of ice elevation. Now, the results are in. Using millions of measurements from a laser in space and quite a bit of math, researchers have confirmed that Earth is rapidly losing ice.
16 Years
ICESat-2 was a follow-up mission to the original ICESat, which launched in 2003 and took measurements until 2009. Comparing the two records tells us how much ice sheets have melted over 16 years.
½ Inch
During those 16 years, melting ice from Antarctica and Greenland was responsible for just over a half-inch of sea level rise. When ice on land melts, it eventually finds its way to the ocean. The rapid melt at the poles is no exception.
400,000 Olympic Swimming Pools
One gigaton of ice holds enough water to fill 400,000 Olympic swimming pools. It’s also enough ice to cover Central Park in New York in more than 1,000 feet of ice.
200 Gigatons
Between 2003 and 2019, Greenland lost 200 gigatons of ice per year. That’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools reaching the ocean every year, just from Greenland alone.
118 Gigatons
During the same time period, Antarctica lost 118 gigatons of ice per year. That’s another 47 million Olympic swimming pools every year. While there has been some elevation gain in the continent’s center from increased snowfall, it’s nowhere near enough to make up for how much ice is lost to the sea from coastal glaciers.
10,000 Pulses
ICESat-2 sends out 10,000 pulses of laser light a second down to Earth’s surface and times how long it takes them to return to the satellite, down to a billionth of a second. That’s how we get such precise measurements of height and changing elevation.
These numbers confirm what scientists have been finding in most previous studies and continue a long record of data showing how Earth’s polar ice is melting. ICESat-2 is a key tool in our toolbox to track how our planet is changing.
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Countdown to Calving at Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf
Cracks growing across Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf are poised to release an iceberg with an area about twice the size of New York City, (about 604 square miles). It is not yet clear how the remaining ice shelf will respond following the break, posing an uncertain future for scientific infrastructure and a human presence on the shelf that was first established in 1955.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen, with image interpretation by Chris Shuman (NASA/UMBC).
The above image, from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the area on January 23, 2019. The crack along the top of the image—the so-called Halloween crack—first appeared in late October 2016 and continues to grow eastward from an area known as the McDonald Ice Rumples. The rumples are due to the way ice flows over an underwater formation, where the bedrock rises high enough to reach into the underside of the ice shelf. This rocky formation impedes the flow of ice and causes pressure waves, crevasses, and rifts to form at the surface.
The more immediate concern is the rift visible in the center of the image. Previously stable for about 35 years, this crack recently started accelerating northward as fast as 4 kilometers per year.
Calving is a normal part of the life cycle of ice shelves, but the recent changes are unfamiliar in this area. The edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has evolved slowly since Ernest Shackleton surveyed the coast in 1915, but it has been speeding up in the past several years.
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Uncovering a Massive Meteor Crater Found Lurking Under the Ice
For the first time ever, we've found a massive crater hiding under one of Earth's ice sheets. Likely caused by a meteor, it was uncovered in Greenland by a team of international scientists using radar data.
The data was collected by missions like our Operation IceBridge, which flies planes over Greenland and Antarctica to study the ice and snow at our planet’s poles.
In this case, the crater is near Hiawatha Glacier, covered by a sheet of ice more than half a mile thick. We're pretty sure that the crater was caused by a meteor because it has characteristics traditionally associated with those kinds of impacts, like a bowl shape and central peaks.
It’s also one of the 25 largest impact craters in the world, large enough to hold the cities of Paris or Washington, D.C. The meteor that created it was likely half a mile wide.
Currently, there’s still lots to learn about the crater – and the meteor that created it – but it’s likely relatively young in geologic timescales. The meteor hit Earth within the last 3 million years, but the impact could have been as recent as 13,000 years ago.
While it was likely smaller than the meteor credited with knocking out the dinosaurs, this impact could have potentially caused a large influx of fresh water into the northern Atlantic Ocean, which would have had profound impacts for life in the region at the time.
Go here to learn more about this discovery: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/international-team-nasa-make-unexpected-discovery-under-greenland-ice
Operation IceBridge continues to uncover the hidden secrets under Earth's ice. IceBridge has been flying for 10 years, providing a data bridge between ICESat, which flew from 2003 to 2009, and ICESat-2, which launched in September. IceBridge uses a suite of instruments to help track the changing height and thickness of the ice and the snow cover above it. IceBridge also measures the bedrock below the ice, which allows for discoveries like this crater.
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Squaring Off with Icebergs with Operation IceBridge
From onboard a NASA research plane, Operation IceBridge is flying survey flights over Antarctica, studying how the frozen continent is changing. The average Antarctic flight is 11-12 hours long; with all that time in the air, the science team sees some striking and interesting views, including two rectangular-looking icebergs off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf.
They're both tabular icebergs, which are relatively common in the Antarctic. They form by breaking off ice shelves -- when they are “fresh,” they have flat tops and angular lines and edges because they haven't been rounded or broken by wind and waves.
Operation IceBridge is one part of NASA's exploration of the cryosphere -- Earth's icy reaches. Follow along as we explore the frozen regions of our home planet.
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Beached Berg in Alaska
Each year since 2009, geophysicist and pilot Chris Larsen has led two sets of flights to monitor Alaska’s mountain glaciers. From the air, scientists like Larsen collect critical information on how the region’s snow and ice is changing. They also are in a good position to snap photographs of the stunning landscape. Larsen was flying with NASA science writer Maria-Jose Viñas on board. During a flight on August 19, 2018, Viñas shot this photograph during a mission to survey Yakutat Icefield and nearby glaciers in southeast Alaska.
The beach and stream in the photograph are in Russel Fjord near the terminus of the Hubbard Glacier. While this photograph does not show any glaciers, evidence of their presence is all around. Meltwater winds down a vegetation-free path of glacial till. On its way toward open water, the stream cuts through a beach strewn with icebergs. “The Hubbard Glacier has a broad and active calving front providing a generous supply of icebergs,” said Larsen, a researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “They are present all summer since new ones keep coming from the glacier.”
NASA’s Operation IceBridge makes lengthy flights each year over the landmasses of Greenland and Antarctica and their surrounding sea ice. While IceBridge-Alaska flights are shorter in length, the terrain is equally majestic and its snow and ice important to monitor. Wherever IceBridge flights are made, data collection depends in part on weather and instruments.
Read more: https://go.nasa.gov/2Mj48r0
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In temperatures that drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two of our scientists are surveying an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice.
They’ve packed extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and after a stop at the South Pole Station (seen in this image), they began a two- to three-week traverse.
The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018.
This traverse provides an extremely challenging way to assess the accuracy of the data. ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.
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Solar System: Things to Know This Week
Has Cassini inspired you? Learn more about dwarf planet Ceres, get the latest images from the Keck Observatory and more!
1. Has Cassini Inspired You?
During nearly two decades in space, Cassini has been a source of inspiration to many. Has Cassini inspired you? Upload your artwork, photos, poems or songs to the social media platform of your choice, such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or others. Tag it #CassiniInspires. Or, send it directly to: cassinimission@jpl.nasa.gov. We'll highlight some of the creations on this page. See examples and details at: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/cassiniinspires/
2. Dawn’s Shines a Light on Ceres
Our Dawn mission has found evidence for organic material on Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Learn more: solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2017/02/17/dawn-discovers-evidence-for-organic-material-on-ceres
3. Into the Vortex
A new device called the vortex coronagraph was recently installed inside NIRC2 (Near Infrared Camera 2) at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star, and separately, a cool, star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near its companion star.
4. Enceladus: Cassini Cracks the Code of the Icy Moon
A puzzling sensor reading transformed our Cassini Saturn mission and created a new target in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth, when on Feb. 17, 2005, Cassini made the first-ever close pass over Saturn’s moon. Since our two Voyager spacecraft made their distant flybys of Enceladus about 20 years prior, scientists had anticipated the little moon would be an interesting place to visit. Enceladus is bright white -- the most reflective object in the solar system, in fact -- and it orbits in the middle of a faint ring of dust-sized ice particles known as Saturn’s E ring. Scientists speculated ice dust was being kicked off its surface somehow. But they presumed it would be, essentially, a dead, airless ball of ice.
What Cassini saw didn't look like a frozen, airless body. Instead, it looked something like a comet that was actively emitting gas. The magnetometer detected that Saturn’s magnetic field, which envelops Enceladus, was perturbed above the moon's south pole in a way that didn't make sense for an inactive world. Could it be that the moon was actively replenishing gases it was breathing into space? Watch the video.
5. Descent Into a Frozen Underworld
Our planet's southernmost active volcano reaches 12,448 feet (3,794 meters) above Ross Island in Antarctica. It's a good stand-in for a frozen alien world, the kind we want to send robots to someday. Learn more: solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2017/02/13/descent-into-a-frozen-underworld
Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.
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