Pine Island Glacier (PIG)
ice shelf is the floating extension of the Pine Island Glacier, one of the
two largest outlet glaciers (Thwaites Glacier is the other) draining the
West Antarctic ice sheet into the Amundsen Sea. Together, these two
glaciers drain roughly one-third of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a volume
of ice equivalent to raising global sea level one meter. The ice shelf is
approximately 40 km long and 20 km wide.
PUNTA ARENAS, CHILE November 1, 2011 – After discovering an emerging crack
that cuts across the floating ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier in
Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge has flown a follow-up mission and
made the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg
calving in progress.
NASA's
Operation Ice Bridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice
ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas,
Chile. The six-year mission will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional
view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice.
Pine Island Glacier last calved a significant iceberg in 2001, and some
scientists have speculated recently that it was primed to calve again. But
until an Oct. 14 IceBridge flight of NASA's DC-8, no one had seen any
evidence of the ice shelf beginning to break apart. Since then, a more
detailed look back at satellite imagery seems to show the first signs of
the crack in early October.
While Pine Island has scientists' attention because it is both big and
unstable – scientists call it the largest source of uncertainty in global
sea level rise projections – the calving underway now is part of a natural
process for a glacier that terminates in open water. Gravity pulls the ice
in the glacier westward along Antarctica's Hudson Mountains toward the
Amundsen Sea. A floating tongue of ice reaches out 30 miles into the
Amundsen beyond the grounding line, the below-sea-level point where the
ice shelf locks onto the continental bedrock. As ice pushes toward the sea
from the interior, inevitably the ice shelf will crack and send a large
iceberg free.
"We are actually now witnessing how it happens and it’s very exciting for
us," said IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger, Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It’s part of a natural process but it’s
pretty exciting to be here and actually observe it while it happens. To my
knowledge, no one has flown a lidar instrument over an actively developing
rift such as this."
A primary goal of Operation IceBridge is to put the same instruments over
the exact same flight lines and satellite tracks, year after year, to
gather meaningful and accurate data of how ice sheets and glaciers are
changing over time. But discovering a developing rift in one of the most
significant science targets in the world of glaciology offered a brief
change in agenda for the Oct. 26 flight, if only for a 30-minute diversion
from the day's prescribed flight lines.
The IceBridge
team observed the rift running across the ice shelf for about 18 miles.
The lidar instrument on the DC-8, the Airborne Topographic Mapper,
measured the rift's shoulders about 820 feet apart (250 meters) at its
widest, although the rift stretched about 260 feet wide along most of the
crack. The deepest points from the ice shelf surface ranged 165 to 195
feet (50 to 60 meters). When the iceberg breaks free it will cover about
340 square miles (880 square kilometers) of surface area. Radar
measurements suggested the ice shelf in the region of the rift is about
1,640 feet (500 meters) feet thick, with only about 160 feet of that
floating above water and the rest submerged. It is likely that once the
iceberg floats away, the leading edge of the ice shelf will have receded
farther than at any time since its location was first recorded in the
1940s
Veteran DC-8
pilot Bill Brockett first flew the day's designed mission, crisscrossing
the flow of the glacier near the grounding line to gather data on its
elevation, topography and thickness. When it came time to investigate the
crack, Brockett flew across it before turning to fly along the rift by
sight. The ATM makes its precision topography maps with a laser than scans
360 degrees 20 times per second, while firing 3,000 laser pulses per
second. When flying at an altitude of 3,000 feet, as during this flight,
it measures a swath of the surface about 1,500 feet wide. As the crack
measured at more than 800 feet wide in places, it was important for
Brockett to hold tight over the crevasse.
"The pilots did a really nice job of keeping the aircraft and our ATM scan
swath pretty much centered over the rift as you flew from one end to the
other," said Jim Yungel, who leads the ATM team out of NASA's Wallops
Island Flight Facility in Virginia. "It was a real challenge to be
told…we’re going to attempt to fly along it and let’s see if your lidar
systems can map that crack and can map the bottom of the crack.
"And it was a lot of fun on a personal level to see if something that you
built over the years can actually do a job like that. So, yeah, I enjoyed
it. I really enjoyed seeing the results being produced."
While the ATM provided the most detailed measurements of the topography of
the rift, other instruments onboard the DC-8 also captured unique aspects.
The Digital Mapping System, a nadir-view camera, gathered high-definition
close-ups of the craggy split. On the flight perpendicular to the crack,
the McCORDS radar also measured its depth and the thickness of the ice
shelf in that region.
Catching the rift in action required a bit of luck, but is also testimony
to the science benefit of consistent, repeated trips and the flexibility
of a manned mission in the field.
"A lot of times when you’re in science, you don’t get a chance to catch
the big stories as they happen because you’re not there at the right place
at the right time," said John Sonntag, Instrument Team Lead for Operation
IceBridge, based at Goddard Space Flight Center. "But this time we were."
