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Narrator: Every year you start out with zero.

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Zero miles flown, zero data collected.

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This year, IceBridge started out with yet another big zero

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there were no aircraft available for the mission, as NASA’s

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decades-old P-3 was getting re-winged.

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So the team turned to their friends at NOAA for help. And they got …

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Miss Piggy, another P-3 aircraft and a veteran

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of 88 hurricane missions from Floyd to Frances to Katrina,

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operated by a crack flight crew ready to tackle

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the far frozen north for the first time.

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After installing IceBridge’s many instruments onto the aircraft,

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performing needed maintenance, and flying a few test flights

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over Tampa Bay, the OIB team was finally ready to go.

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The team’s first target was to take measurements

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measurements of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, and after a few weeks,

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IceBridge had achieved solid coverage of the western Arctic basin,

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and on one mission, even grazed the North Pole itself, coming within

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200 meters of the top of the world.

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From there, the mission changed its focus to northern land ice, and after

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waiting days for the fog to lift, finally managed to hit a crucial target –

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the Zachariae Isstrom. This massive glacier

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drains 5% of the Greenland ice sheet, and in 2012,

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entered into a phase of rapid retreat, making repeat measurements

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all the more crucial.

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Finally, the mission hit a range of classic land ice targets in south and central Greenland,

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including the Jakobshavn Glacier in the west and Helheim in the East.

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These measurements, taken at the end of the freeze cycle,

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will provide a good baseline for IceBridge’s next campaign

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a high altitude repeat of many of the same flight paths at the end of the melt season.

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Comparing the two data sets will reveal