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[Music]

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NASA's Operation IceBridge

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Mission the largest airborne survey of adverse polar ice every flown

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kicks off it's second year with the arrival of two NASA aircraft next week in Greenland.

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The team will spend 200 hours gathering data using a suite

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of instruments that peer below some of the regions critical glaciers

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IceBridge is aptly named because it will bridge the data gap between

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the loss of NASA's Ice Cloud and Land elevation satellite, or ICESat

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and the launch of ICESat 2 planned for 2015.

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[John Sonntag] I think its probably safe to say if it weren't for Operation IceBridge

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or the similar efforts that the global science community would lose a lot of its knowledge

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of what's going on with Greenland and Antarctica as a whole.

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[Narrator] 200 hours in the air, require a lot of work on the ground

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engineers have been outfitting NASA's DC8 and PB3 aircraft with an array of

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science instruments. IceBridge planes

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resurvey previous ICESat tracks to get a sense of how arctic ice is changing.

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[John Sonntag] I think the last thing that NASA would like to see is

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to take a snap shot of the ice at the end of ICESat 1

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operational period. Get another snap shot at the beginning of ICESat

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2 and have no idea what happen in between. That is essentially what IceBridge is about

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is filling in that gap knowledge. [Bryan Blair] If you want to look at

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areas that are very dynamic like a glacial region

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its like a lot of ice moving through and there is a lot of vertical changes, we can map that entire

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area and capture the full spacial variably of

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that change. Which is a really good indication of what's the mechanics of

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how that change is happening. [John Sonntag] Greenland because of it's

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presence and Antarctica all the ice mass act as a buffer and climate

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and so if they were to start to melt, which many people

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believe that they are. Then the eventual affect will be a

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warmer climate over all. [Narrator] Annual spring missions over the

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arctic and fall missions over Antarctica will allow scientists to track changes

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in polar ice thickness and extent, so we have a better picture of ice dynamics.

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and future sea level rise.