The Ice Detectives

National Science Foundation
Office of Polar Programs
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230

Posted September 13, 2017

Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University in the City of New York, features a story that focusses on the work of NSF funded researchers, such as Columbia’s Robin E. Bell, and projects such as IcePod, a collaborative effort with the 109th Airlift Wing, in trying to predict the fate of the Earth’s polar ice sheets.

“... Today, earth’s great ice sheets sprawl over Antarctica and Greenland, the vast, sliding bodies polished by the harshest conditions on the planet, layered with millennia of snowfall packed more than two miles thick in spots: a colossal architecture moving constantly under its own weight, sloping toward the sea.

Robin Bell ’89GSAS is watching. Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and one of the world’s leading polar investigators, has been tracking ice for thirty years: inspecting it, measuring it, drilling it, flying over it, spying under it, peering through its layers, sleeping on it, skiing on it. She has coordinated ten expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland, which between them hold more than 99 percent of the world’s frozen fresh water.

That ice is transforming before her eyes.

“There are three lines of evidence that the ice sheets are changing,” Bell says. “One: in some places they are flowing twice as fast as they were twenty years ago — a mile a year in the last decade, two miles a year now. Two: their elevation has dropped. Three: they are losing mass, which we can tell from satellite measurements.”
...

Designed and built with grant money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IcePod is rigged with conventional and infrared cameras adapted for ice use by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory oceanographer Chris Zappa ’92SEAS (the infrared cameras can detect unseen cracks, or crevasses, by measuring tiny variances in ground temperature); shallow- and deep-ice radar built by Nick Frearson, IcePod’s lead engineer; a scanning laser to create 3D images of the ice surface; and a magnetometer to measure the earth’s magnetic field.”

Read more here: http://magazine.columbia.edu/features/fall-2017/ice-detectives?page=0,0