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Measuring Antartica Melting Ice From Space
posted by dct
on Thursday March 09, @09:46AM
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from the The-Rising-Tide dept.
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from the The-Rising-Tide dept.
The BBC writes: "A new space-based study of Antarctica shows its ice sheet is shrinking. Researchers used satellites to plot changes in the Earth's gravity in the Antarctic during the period 2002-2005... Data comes from a pair of satellites together known as Grace which orbit the Earth in tandem, measuring changes in its gravitational field.
When they fly over regions where there is lots of material below, such as mountain ranges, or where crustal rocks are more dense, they will register an increase in the Earth's gravity - tiny, but measurable... "This is a completely new way of measuring the ice sheet mass balance, and so it's extremely exciting," commented David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, a specialist on the issue."
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Slashdot discuss a Yahoo! News article about ESA's Envisat and EOS Aqua "showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself". From the article: "Regular satellite monitoring over the last 25 years shows that the northern polar ice cover has shrunk and thinned as global temperatures have risen.
But this year's images are unprecedented, and fierce storms that fragmented and scattered already thin pack ice may be to blame, the scientists believe." See last year story on the same topic. Update: 09/21 17:29 GMT by S :La Cartoteca links to a ESA article with screenshots.
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