Charting Icelandic glacier dynamics
Friday, March 14, 2014 - 10:01
in Earth & Climate
Mark Simons, professor of geophysics at Caltech, along with graduate student Brent Minchew, recently logged over 40 hours of flight time mapping the surface of Iceland's glaciers. Flying over two comparatively small ice caps, Hofsjökull and Langjökull, they traveled with NASA pilots and engineers in a retrofitted Gulfstream III business jet, crisscrossing the glaciers numerous times. Using a radar instrument designed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and mounted on the underbelly of the plane, they imaged the surface of the glaciers, obtaining precise data on the velocity at which these rivers of ice flow downstream.