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The satellite carries two scientific instruments: a radar and a radiometer, that share a single feed and deployable 6 m reflector antenna system, built by Northrop Grumman, [1] that rotates around the nadir axis making conical scans of the surface. The wide swath provides near-global revisit every 2–3 days.
The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area of almost 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and contains 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice. [6] A cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately 0.92 metric gigatonnes, meaning that the ice sheet weighs about 24,380,000 gigatonnes.
A map of West Antarctica. The total volume of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is estimated at 26.92 million km 3 (6.46 million cu mi), [2] while the WAIS contains about 2.1 million km 3 (530,000 cu mi) in ice that is above the sea level, and ~1 million km 3 (240,000 cu mi) in ice that is below it. [20]
ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite) was a NASA satellite mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. It operated as part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS).
An ice cap in equilibrium accumulates and ablates snow at the same rate. The AAR is the ratio between the accumulation area and the total area of the ice cap, which is used to indicate the health of the glacier. [6] Depending on their shape and mass, healthy glaciers in equilibrium typically have an AAR of approximately 0.4 to 0.8. [6]
Greenland ice sheet as seen from space. An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively.
Halley Research Station is a research facility in Antarctica on the Brunt Ice Shelf operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). The base was established in 1956 to study the Earth's atmosphere.
However, satellite imagery and remote sensing data also reveal that high-elevation lakes rarely form new moulins there. [7] Thus, the role of supraglacial lakes in the basal hydrology of the ice sheet is unlikely to change in the near future: they will continue to bring water to the bed by forming moulins within a few tens of kilometers of the ...