Patagonia, Chile. Left: September 18, 1986. Right: August 5, 2002. The 1986 image shows the region prior to a major retreat of the glaciers. The 2002 image shows a retreat of nearly 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of the glacier on the left side. The smaller glacier on the right has receded more than 2 kilometers … Read more
As Greenland’s ice retreats, it’s fueling tiny ocean organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model out of JPL and MIT that’s been called a laboratory in itself. Runoff from Greenland’s ice sheet is kicking nutrients up from the ocean depths and boosting phytoplankton growth, a new NASA-supported study has found. Reporting in … Read more
Citizen science projects result in an overwhelmingly positive impact on the polar tourism experience. That’s according to a new paper analyzing participant experiences in the first two years of FjordPhyto, a NASA Citizen Science project.. The FjordPhyto citizen science project invites travelers onboard expedition cruise vessels to gather data and samples during the polar summer … Read more
A Q&A with the lead U.S. scientist of the mission, which will track changes in everything from wetlands to ice sheets to infrastructure damaged by natural disasters. The upcoming U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission will observe Earth like no mission before, offering insights about our planet’s ever-changing surface. The NISAR mission is a … Read more
Arctic sea ice retreated to near-historic lows in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, likely melting to its minimum extent for the year on Sept.11, 2024, according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The decline continues the decades-long trend of shrinking and thinning ice cover in the Arctic Ocean. … Read more
Linette Boisvert turned a childhood love of snow into a career as a sea ice scientist studying climate change. Name: Linette BoisvertTitle: Assistant Lab Chief, Cryospheric Sciences Branch, and Deputy Project Scientist for the Aqua SatelliteFormal Job Classification: Sea Ice ScientistOrganization: Cryospheric Science Branch, Science Directorate (Code 615) What do you do and what is most interesting … Read more
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic, and a new NASA mission is helping improve data modeling and increasing our understanding of Earth’s rapidly changing climate. Changing ice, ocean, and atmospheric conditions in the northernmost part of Earth have a large impact on the entire planet. That’s because the Arctic region acts … Read more
NASA’s Terra satellite captured floating fragments of sea ice as ocean currents carried them south along Greenland’s east coast on June 4, 2024. This ice traveled from the Fram Strait, a 450-kilometer (280-mile)-wide passage between Greenland and Svalbard, to the Arctic Ocean. Along the journey, it breaks into smaller pieces and starts to melt in … Read more
Sea ice at both the top and bottom of the planet continued its decline in 2024. In the waters around Antarctica, ice coverage shrank to near-historic lows for the third year in a row. The recurring loss hints at a long-term shift in conditions in the Southern Ocean, likely resulting from global climate change, according … Read more
Launching in spring 2024, the two small satellites of the agency’s PREFIRE mission will fill in missing data from Earth’s polar regions. Two new miniature NASA satellites will start crisscrossing Earth’s atmosphere in a few months, detecting heat lost to space. Their observations from the planet’s most bone-chilling regions will help predict how our ice, … Read more