A Rare Look At The Laser Beam NASA Uses To Scan For Sea Ice

Most of the sentence , when man - made political machine come aspect - to - face with vast fields of sea ice , it ’s mankind who turn a loss out ( see : Titanic ) . But in this image from NASA ’s Operation Ice Bridge , we get a rare look a humans impose gild on the planet ’s robustious machinations .

Operation IceBridge is an annual NASA missionary post , which involve sending two flight all the way along the North American side of the Arctic Ocean — basically , Greenland to Alaska and back again . The planes employ a variety of sensors to record the thickness , tiptop and characteristics of the ice — a job that ca n’t quite be done by satellite , yet .

According to sea crank scientistSinead Farrell , the effigy shows distinctive , gently deformed first - year ocean frappe . Smallpressure ridgesandsastrugi(snow dunes ) are seeable on the Earth’s surface . What ’s rare about the image , however , is that it was capture during first few hours of twilight . The lack of sun provided an chance for the DMS to get a glimpse of optical maser beams scanning the sea water ice . Next to the DMS in the paunch of the carpenter’s plane , theAirborne Topographic Mapper(ATM ) sends pulses of laser light off of a rotating mirror and onto the frappe below . This pic shows the elliptical scan pattern of the ATM as it made 94 laser shots in the one - thirtieth of a second that the DMS camera shutter was open .

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By time the orotund - slip journeying of the unaccented pulses and accounting for the location and EL of the plane , scientist can determine the height of the ice surface . Flying the same path every yr provides detailed data about how the control surface top of the ice has changed . This information in turn contributes to calculations of ocean ice rink thickness in these domain , which scientists have shown to be thin out .

The annotated rendering of the image below helps explain the dislocation .

Images : NASA Earth Observatory

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