(credit: NASA/EO)
Extracting information from the ice-covered continent of Antarctica isn’t easy. You have to go a long way just to ask, and the region isn’t exactly known for its hospitality. And yet, the answers we seek are important ones—if any significant portion of the ice sheets melt as the climate warms, the sea will advance on coastal areas around the world.
Antarctica’s coastal outlet glaciers are on the front lines of climate change, and so may get visits from curious scientists. But the expanse of the continental interior is even tougher to study. Satellites are absolutely indispensable for efforts to quantify the big picture answers there, like how much Antarctica’s icy burden is changing.
A number of satellite techniques are being tried, from precise measurements of the surface elevation of the ice using radar or lasers, to sensitive measurements of Earth’s gravitational pull to detect mass changes, to simple input-output models based on snowfall data and tracking the velocity of the ice that flows into the ocean.
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