| [00:00:00.02] | [aircraft sound] |
| [00:00:04.11] | We are currently on our mission down to Pine Island Glacier in west Antarctica |
| [00:00:08.16] | and we will be flying about a 3 hour survey there over the glacier. |
| [00:00:12.21] | Pine Island Glacier losing ice very quickly |
| [00:00:16.27] | about 6 meters per year and today we will go back and re-fly |
| [00:00:20.31] | the same mission that we have flown two years earlier in 2009. |
| [00:00:24.40] | And we can compare the data that we collect today to our previous data |
| [00:00:28.46] | and also to the data of the ICESat satellite that has collected |
| [00:00:32.50] | surface elevation measurements there over many years. And this will tell us |
| [00:00:36.55] | how much ice is being lost in west Antarctica |
| [00:00:40.64] | and contributes to sea level rise. |
| [00:00:44.72] | Two weeks ago we had another mission over Pine Island Glacier |
| [00:00:48.78] | and when looking out of the window of the aircraft we noticed |
| [00:00:52.80] | a fairly large crack in the ice shelf. |
| [00:00:56.84] | And I talked back to colleagues in the U.S. that downloaded satellite images |
| [00:01:00.93] | and they reported that this crack has formed in sometime between |
| [00:01:04.98] | end of September or early October. |
| [00:01:09.00] | These things happen on a semi-regular basis in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, |
| [00:01:13.04] | but it's still a fairly large event. |
| [00:01:17.16] | So we wanted to make sure we captured as much of that process as we could. |
| [00:01:21.17] | So today was our first trip to be back in the area and what we do is we modified the existing flight plan |
| [00:01:25.19] | to add another half hour to the flight in order to catch a flight along the |
| [00:01:29.30] | direction of the rift, in order to get mainly a lidar and photographic map of |
| [00:01:33.37] | the shape, depth of the rift, and the width of it -- see how it's developing over time. |
| [00:01:37.43] | At the moment the crack is about 80 meters wide. |
| [00:01:41.46] | If it continues to propagate, it's about an iceberg that ice the area of 800 square kilometers |
| [00:01:45.51] | that eventually will break off from the |
| [00:01:49.54] | Pine Island Glacier. |
| [00:01:53.61] | Now if we're lucky, we may get another chance to come back to this area later, if weather and |
| [00:01:57.74] | timing permits, to do what we just did today to see how the rift has further developed as time goes on. |
| [00:02:01.91] | A lot of times when you're in science you |
| [00:02:05.95] | don't get a chance to catch the big stories as they happen because you're |
| [00:02:10.08] | not there at the right time, but this time we were. |
| [00:02:14.15] | These are discreet processes in time, they take place over a period of just a few weeks |
| [00:02:18.18] | and we just happened to be here at the right time to catch it. |