[whoosh, laser sound]
[music]
At 5am 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.
[beep beep, beep beep]