NASA Scientists Embark on Extreme Antarctic Trek

The Asian Age With Agency Inputs

A team led by two NASA scientists will survey an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice.

The team will collect precise GPS data of the elevation at 88 degrees south, where ICESat-2’s orbits converge, providing thousands of points where the survey measurements can be compared to satellite data.

In temperatures that can drop below -20 degrees Fahrenheit, along with a route occasionally blocked by wind-driven ice dunes, a hundred miles from any other people, a team led by two NASA scientists will survey an unexplored stretch of Antarctic ice.

They’re packing extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and on December 21 they will begin their two- to three-week traverse in an arc around the South Pole.

The 470-mile expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018. With a fast-firing laser instrument, ICESat-2 will measure the elevation of ice sheets and track change over time. Even small amounts of melt across areas as vast as Greenland or Antarctica can result in large amounts of meltwater contributing to sea level rise.

To help document this, ICESat-2's height change measurements will have a precision of less than an inch – ground-truthed, in part, with efforts like this Antarctic campaign. The team will collect precise GPS data of the elevation at 88 degrees south, where ICESat-2’s orbits converge, providing thousands of points where the survey measurements can be compared to satellite data.

“This traverse provides an extremely challenging and extremely cold way to assess the accuracy of the data,” said Kelly Brunt, ICESat-2’s calibration and validation lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, and a research scientist at the University of Maryland. “ICESat-2’s datasets are going to tell us incredible things about how Earth’s ice is changing, and what that means for things like sea level rise.”

Brunt is leading the four-person campaign from the South Pole, along with ICESat-2’s deputy project scientist Tom Neumann. The NASA scientists will also be joined by a mechanic and a deep field mountaineer. The campaign to collect these key elevation measurements has been years in the making, with logistical help from the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program.

The first few days at the South Pole station will be spent acclimatizing to the altitude, Neumann said, noting that the cold, dry air makes the environment even harsher. Once on the road, however, he plans to spend evenings out in the elements, digging holes.

“I’ll measure the density of the snow along the way,” he said. By shovelling out a three-foot-deep pit, he can see layers of snow that have built up over decades, some of which can be hard to dig past. “They’re not super dense, but they’re so old the grains of snow are bonded together like its cement.”

When ICESat-2 starts collecting elevation data, the snow density measurements and the data from the ground penetrating radar will help determine how much mass is lost when the ice sheet drops in elevation. The 88-degree traverse is also an opportunity for Brunt and Neumann to play the odds. At three different sites along the route, they’ll set up a grid of nine reflector cubes, each no bigger than the tip of a pinkie finger. They’ll mark the precise latitude, longitude, and elevation of each cube.

Then, once ICESat-2 is up and running, they’ll wait. If one of the satellite’s six laser beams hits a cube, the mirrored material of the cube will reflect the laser light back at a much higher than normal intensity. Since they’ll know the exact location and elevation of the cube, they can check the accuracy of the satellite data even more precisely than with the traverse data.

“If you hit that tiny little point, you’ll know exactly where the laser hit on the ground,” Brunt said. “But hitting that point is both aiming and luck. It’s hard. But, by placing them at 88 degrees, where you have so many orbits crossing and so much data, it’s just a statistics game.”

After the traverse, the scientists will return to the United States, retracing their steps from the South Pole station to McMurdo Station, to New Zealand and home. With them: hard drives full of data to help understand the accuracy of ICESat-2.

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