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Magruder: So ICESat-2 provides bathymetric measurements, and what that means is that measurements beneath the surface of the water.
So we can map the topography underwater.
This is interesting because you might notice the really strong returns from beneath the surface of the water.
Although this is a pretty shallow area, about ten meters or thirty feet deep, the signal is quite strong.
Just as strong as from the surface of the water.
The reason that is is that there's a lot of limestone in the deposits there, and it's highly reflective.
So ICESat-2 gets a lot of reflected photons back from those laser shots.
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Neuenschwander: In this profile, the vegetation is dominated by
shrub mopane, which is typically in the two to three meter range, and there's also some mopane
and acacia trees that typically that are in the four to six meter height range.
Something that scientists need to understand and quantify is where carbon is being taken up
and where it is already being stored.
Because much of the effort related to mapping global biomass has been really focused
in the tropics where the trees are large and the biomass is high,
many of these savanna and woodland ecosystems tend to get neglected or are poorly characterized
in global carbon accounting efforts.
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Gardner: Now one of the unique things about ICESat-2 is it's actually able to see down into
the valleys of these very steep topography areas where the glaciers are.
And so there's other instruments, like radar, that aren't able to see the glaciers all the way down in the valleys
and so ICESat-2 is going to let us measure the changes in mountain glaciers so we can assess how they're responding to changes
in climate and what potential they have to contribute to both sea level rise in the future
but also changes in water resources.
Glaciers in this region have been experiencing rapid rates of thinning
and that thinning is in response to changes in climate.
Not only are these glaciers thinning, but as they thin, there's less force pulling them downward.
And that less force pulling them downward is causing them to actually slow down.
In high mountain Asia, we actually have glaciers that are thinning and slowing down as they respond to climate.
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