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[music]

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[aircraft noise]

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The Jakobshavn Glacier on the west coast of Greenland. It’s a familiar destination,

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but it certainly looks different every year. Yesterday Operation IceBridge

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returned to the glacier for the first time in 2013, repeating

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a high priority mission they’ve now flown for five consecutive years, and

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and collected another trove of valuable data and some great images.

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What’s so special about Jakobshavn that keeps IceBridge and other researchers coming back?

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Well, it’s one of the fastest moving glaciers in Greenland,

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it produces more icebergs than any other northern glacier,

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and over the past 150 years it’s been retreating dramatically.

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Studying how glaciers like Jakobshavn are changing from year-to-year

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helps scientists get a handle on both the movement of the ice on a local scale,

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and ultimately how much these glaciers might contribute to sea level rise.

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While studying the upstream catchment area of the glacier

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– kind of like the drainage basin of a river – was the primary objective

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on yesterday’s flight, making a pass over the calving front of the glacier is always

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a highlight of the mission, as we can see from this video taken last year.

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Here we see two views

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of the calving front from this year… with laser elevation data above …

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and high-resolution photographic data below. And here’s a closer

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look at just how detailed that imagery is.

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IceBridge plans to be back in Jakobshavn next year.

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Past, present and future IceBridge flights over regions like this one

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are aimed at building a continuous record of change in Earth's

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polar regions to bridge the gap between NASA's ICESat satellite