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[whoosh, laser sound]

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[music]

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At 5am the Operation IceBridge team

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got the weather briefing they were hoping to hear: The Ross Sea

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had unusually clear skies, and so the first ever basin-wide

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laser and radar survey of this critical area was officially a go.

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"It should be good all day. Yeah, but like you said, this

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has been pretty ugly for quite a while so." "Yeah, it has. And that's a baseline mission."

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Three hours later, the NASA P-3 aircraft

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was on the move, taking off from the sea ice runway at

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McMurdo Station, and heading to its science target.

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The particular flight paths for the Ross Sea

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Fluxgate mission were chosen to sample the movement, or flux,

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of flows of sea ice moving northward from the coast.

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A few hours into the mission, the team encountered

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large icebergs that had broken off of nearby ice sheets, as well as many

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cracks of open ocean water, or leads, in the sea ice.

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These leads generated moisture in the air, causing localized

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fog and low cloud cover, but nothing the team’s instruments couldn’t handle.

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The leads also make a good science target because

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measuring the local sea surface height enables researchers to estimate the thickness

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of the sea ice above and below the water.

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The Ross Sea is particularly important to study since it’s one of the few places

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where sea ice coverage has been, on average, increasing

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over the last few decades. IceBridge thickness

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data should help illuminate whether that increased area actually represents