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We are currently on our mission down to Pine Island Glacier in west Antarctica

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and we will be flying about a 3 hour survey there over the glacier.

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Pine Island Glacier losing ice very quickly

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about 6 meters per year and today we will go back and re-fly

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the same mission that we have flown two years earlier in 2009.

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And we can compare the data that we collect today to our previous data

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and also to the data of the ICESat satellite that has collected

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surface elevation measurements there over many years. And this will tell us

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how much ice is being lost in west Antarctica

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and contributes to sea level rise.

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Two weeks ago we had another mission over Pine Island Glacier

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and when looking out of the window of the aircraft we noticed

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a fairly large crack in the ice shelf.

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And I talked back to colleagues in the U.S. that downloaded satellite images

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and they reported that this crack has formed in sometime between

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end of September or early October.

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These things happen on a semi-regular basis in both the Arctic and the Antarctic,

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but it’s still a fairly large event.

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So we wanted to make sure we captured as much of that process as we could.

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So today was our first trip to be back in the area and what we do is we modified the existing flight plan

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to add another half hour to the flight in order to catch a flight along the

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direction of the rift, in order to get mainly a lidar and photographic map of

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the shape, depth of the rift, and the width of it -- see how it's developing over time.

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At the moment the crack is about 80 meters wide.

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If it continues to propagate, it's about an iceberg that ice the area of 800 square kilometers

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that eventually will break off from the

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Pine Island Glacier.

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Now if we're lucky, we may get another chance to come back to this area later, if weather and

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timing permits, to do what we just did today to see how the rift has further developed as time goes on.

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A lot of times when you're in science you

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don't get a chance to catch the big stories as they happen because you're

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not there at the right time, but this time we were.