Press Releases & Feature Stories Archive - Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory

Thick and Thin Ice in the Weddell Sea

12.18.2018

New elevation measurements will give researchers an unprecedented understanding of the thickness of sea ice, which will be used to help improve climate modeling and forecasts.

Snow over Antarctica Buffered Sea Level Rise during Last Century

12.13.2018

A new NASA-led study has determined that an increase in snowfall accumulation over Antarctica during the 20th century mitigated sea level rise by 0.4 inches.

ICESat-2 Reveals Profile of Ice Sheets, Sea Ice, Forests

12.11.2018

A detailed profile of Earth's ice and forests – newly formed sea ice, rugged glaciers of Antarctica, trees towering over a hillside - is revealed in the first results from NASA's ICESat-2.

More Glaciers in East Antarctica Are Waking Up

12.10.2018

New detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning along one eighth of East Antarctica's coast have begun to wake up over the past decade, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean.

Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Growth Slows Long-term Decline: NASA

12.06.2018

The Arctic sea ice cover has been on a steep decline for the past decades. But new NASA research has found that increases in seasonal winter Arctic ice growth may have helped prevent an even more rapid rate of decline.

International Team, NASA Make Unexpected Discovery Under Greenland Ice

11.14.2018

An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in northwest Greenland.

Pine Island Glacier Quickly Drops Another Iceberg

11.09.2018

Calving that used to happen about every six years has become a near-annual event.

Massive Antarctic Iceberg Spotted on NASA IceBridge Flight

11.08.2018

NASA’s Operation IceBridge on Wednesday, November 7 flew over an iceberg that is three times the size of Manhattan – the first time anyone has laid eyes on the giant iceberg, dubbed B-46 by the U.S. National Ice Center, that broke off from Pine Island Glacier in late October.

Kelly Brunt - Ice-Sheet Researcher Who Keeps Tabs on Our Melting Planet

11.06.2018

Kelly Burnt is a research scientist who specializes in ice-sheet research and keeps tabs on ice sheet melt the world over.

NASA Brings its Science and Supercomputing Advances to SC18

11.05.2018

From designing rocket launch pad components and safer rotorcraft to improving flood and drought forecasts to modeling the formation of planetary disks, NASA will highlight supercomputing advances at SC18, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Nov. 12 to 15 in Dallas.

NASA Scientist to Discuss New Space Missions to Monitor the Polar Regions at Library of Congress Lecture

11.02.2018

The public is invited to a free talk called 'NASA’s Leadership in Monitoring the Polar Regions from Space: GRACE-FO and ICESat-2,' with Dr. Tom Neumann.

A Place Where Icebergs Go to Die

10.31.2018

This image could be a scene out of a spooky movie, but the reality is just as morbid.

2 Rectangular Icebergs Spotted on NASA IceBridge Flight

10.23.2018

Operation IceBridge, NASA’s longest-running aerial survey of polar ice, carried a flight over the northern Antarctic Peninsula on Oct. 16, 2018. During the flight, IceBridge senior support scientist Jeremy Harbeck spotted two rectangular icebergs floating among sea ice just off of the Larsen C ice shelf.

Operation IceBridge, ICESat-2 Join Forces To Survey Antarctica

10.12.2018

NASA’s decade-long airborne survey of polar ice, Operation IceBridge, is once again probing Antarctica, but this year is different: it is the first time that the IceBridge team and instruments survey the frozen continent while NASA’s brand-new ICESat-2 studies it from space.

ICESat-2 Laser Fires for 1st Time, Measures Antarctic Height

10.03.2018

With each of its 10,000 pulses per second, the laser instrument aboard NASA's ICESat-2 is sending 300 trillion green photons of light to the ground and detecting the few that return: the method it uses to measure Earth’s changing ice. By the morning of Oct. 3, ICESat-2 returned its first height measurements across the Antarctic ice sheet.