Jun
27
2018
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IceBridge Flies High
In late 2017, a specially modified airplane contracted by NASA crisscrossed Antarctica, mapping the ice below and filling in a data gap left by a now-defunct NASA satellite called ICESat, which measured the elevation of the ice surface using a laser. Operation IceBridge flights are bridging the gap between ICESat and its successor, ICESat-2.
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Feb
14
2018
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Circumnavigating the Pole Hole
In January, researchers went for a more than 750-kilometer drive around the South Pole. The team followed the arc of the 88th parallel for a quarter of its distance ringing the South Pole. Their cargo was a sensitive GPS unit to record the exact elevation of the ice sheet they drove over. The effort is in support of NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, a mission devoted to measuring ice levels around the world, particularly in the polar regions.
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Jun
14
2017
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Dating The East Antarctic Ice Sheet
The history of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is written in stones along the Transantarctic Mountains. Over the past two years, researchers ventured to remote areas along the mountain range to decipher how high ancient glaciers reached, by studying the rocks they left behind. By measuring the amount of cosmic radiation the rocks have been exposed to, the research team can map out the reach of ancient glaciers at different points in the past.
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Apr
20
2017
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Ancient Ice Levels
Today, a massive sheet of ice covers nearly all of West Antarctica, but it hasn't always been that way. Over the past few hundred thousand years, researchers think that the ice sheets have waxed and waned, varying in size as the region's climate changed. To gather evidence of how dynamic the ice cover has been in the past, John Stone of the University of Washington and his team traveled to a remote region of the continent this past season.
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Sep
27
2016
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Capturing a Collapse
Not much remains of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, but what is left can teach scientists a lot about how mighty masses of ice fall apart, especially when its last lingering sliver finally crumbles. Researchers traveled to the Scar Inlet along the Antarctic Peninsula to study the remnants of the former ice shelf in February to better understand the peril that glaciers around Antarctica are facing.
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Jul
05
2016
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Little Pieces of Outer Space on the Frozen Continent
The Antarctic ice is home to stuff "not of this Earth." Each year, scientists travel to remote sections of the frozen continent to look for these pieces of outer space. They're hunting for meteorites; the charred remains of asteroids and other space debris that fell to Earth. This year, after five weeks out in the field, the eight-person Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) team returned with 569 likely meteorites.
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Apr
12
2016
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Getting to the Bottom of SPICECORE
The South Pole Ice Core project, known more succinctly as SPICECORE, wrapped up its two-year drilling effort at the South Pole in late January, having exceeded even their most ambitious goals. Researchers collected ice samples from 1,751 meters (5,744 feet) below the surface, more than 200 meters (656 feet) deeper than their original target.
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Feb
24
2016
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An Airborne Look Through the Ice
Though researchers at McMurdo Station have been studying the Ross Ice Shelf for decades, the seafloor beneath it largely remains a mystery. Scientists with the ROSETTA mapping project are working to fill in one of the largest remaining blank spots on ocean charts.
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Jun
08
2015
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Good Things Come in Small Packages
Led by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, IcePod bundles together a suite of instruments into a capsule designed to provide new details about structures above, within and below Antarctica's ice-covered surface.
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Mar
26
2015
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Going Deep
The South Pole is a very cold place, with an average annual temperature of around minus 50 degrees Celsius. Even the ice is especially cold at the bottom of the world. And that's a good thing for a team of researchers interested in extracting the first deep ice core at the South Pole.
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Mar
13
2015
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Search for Ancient Ice
For more than a quarter-century, David Marchant, a Boston University professor, has been exploring the Transantarctic Mountains, methodically piecing together the story of the landscape and past climate change and what it has to tell us about the future of our warming planet.
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Jan
09
2015
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Two for One
The most ambitious and extensive network of seismographs ever deployed on an ice shelf promises to reveal new information about two very different subjects.
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Nov
27
2014
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Moon over McMurdo
The interface between water and ice on the underside of the McMurdo Ice Shelf is where Antarctica and Europa intersect in terms of how conditions at the former may help future exploration of Jupiter's icy moon nearly 400 million miles away.
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The First Wave of the "Thwaites Invasion"
Buried Treasure
