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[Michael Studinger] I'm Michael Stundinger and I'm the

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project scientist for Operation IceBridge.

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[music] In the particular upcoming campaign, we will focus on

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measuring ice surface elevations over Antarctica with a laser scanner

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we have mounted on the DC-8 aircraft. And we will also look into measuring

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the surface elevation and surface characteristics of the sea ice that surrounds

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Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Since we have this opportunity with a big aircraft

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that can carry many different instruments that not only measure the ice surface

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but we have also ice-penetrating radar instruments on the aircraft that

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allow us to actually look through the ice and find out how thick the ice is over the interior of Antarctica.

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This is something we need to know in great detail in order to

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have better ice sheet models that will allow us to characterize how much sea level

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will rise in the next decades.

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About the time we started flying in Antarctica last year in October, ICESat

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stopped collecting data. The follow-up mission, ICESat-II, will launch

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in 2015. In order to fill this gap, NASA

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has launched Operation IceBridge. We're looking back through ten years

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of weather history to come up with a certain estimate of how many flights, depending on