Engineers who build NASA spacecraft that explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of robotic submersible probes to measure how quickly climate change is melting vast swaths of ice near Antarctica, and what that means for rising sea levels.
The prototype vehicles, developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, were tested at a U.S. Navy base in the Arctic, where they were launched over the frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in March.
“These robots are a platform to deliver scientific instruments to the most difficult-to-reach places on Earth,” Paul Glick, a robotics engineer at the lab and principal investigator for the IceNode project, said in a summary posted Thursday on NASA’s website.
The probes aim to provide more accurate data to measure how much warming ocean water near Antarctica is contributing to the melting of the continent’s coastal ice, allowing scientists to improve computer models that predict future sea levels.
A lab analysis published in 2022 found that the thinning and collapse of Antarctic ice shelves has reduced their mass by about 12 trillion tons since 1997, double previous estimates.
If it were to melt completely, the loss of the continent’s ice shelf would raise sea levels by about 60 meters, according to NASA.
Ice shelves, floating sheets of frozen freshwater that stretch for miles from land to sea, take thousands of years to form and act as giant buffers holding back glaciers that would otherwise easily slide into the surrounding ocean.
Satellite images have shown icebergs calving at a rate greater than nature can replenish the shelves.
At the same time, rising ocean temperatures are eroding the shelves underneath, a phenomenon that scientists want to examine more precisely with these probes.
This content was originally published in Scientists create probes to measure Antarctic ice melt on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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