Topic: NASA’s Earth Science News Team

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) will study plant growth

April 10, 2019 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – NASA says when plants take in too much energy, they don’t get fat – they lighten up. They absorb more sunlight than they need to power photosynthesis, and they get rid of the excess solar energy by emitting it as a very faint glow.

The light is far too dim for us to notice under normal circumstances, but it can be measured with a spectrometer. Called solar-induced fluorescence (SIF), it’s the most accurate signal of photosynthesis that can be observed from space.

That’s important because, as Earth’s climate changes, growing seasons worldwide are also changing in both timing and length.

This honeysuckle is glowing in response to a high-energy ultraviolet light rather than to the Sun, but its shine is similar to the solar-induced fluorescence that OCO-3 will measure. (©Craig P. Burrows)

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NASA’s OCO-3 instrument brings new techniques, technologies to study Carbon Dioxide on Earth to International Space Station

April 4, 2019 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – NASA is ready to launch a new space instrument that will use the vantage point of the International Space Station to monitor Earth’s carbon cycle.

A follow-on to the still-active OCO-2 mission, OCO-3 will bring not only a new vantage point but new techniques and new technologies to NASA’s carbon dioxide observations.

Why are we launching a new carbon observatory? Read on.

Illustration of NASA’s OCO-3 mounted on the underside of the International Space Station. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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NASA’s Operation IceBridge has explored Alaska’s Mountain Glaciers for almost a decade

April 2, 2019 |

NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – In Alaska, 5 percent of the land is covered by glaciers that are losing a lot of ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a small team of NASA-funded researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009.

In almost a decade of operations, the Operation IceBridge Alaska team has more than doubled the number of mountain glaciers surveyed in the state known as “The Last Frontier.” Data from the mission has put numbers to the loss of Alaskan glaciers from 1994 to 2013: 75 gigatons of ice every year.

In Alaska, five percent of the land is covered by glaciers that are contributing to sea level rise in ways disproportionately large to their size. A small airborne campaign has been monitoring these changes since 2009. (NASA)

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NASA says Greenland’s fastest moving, fastest thinning Glacier is slowing, thickening

March 28, 2019 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – NASA research shows that Jakobshavn Glacier, which has been Greenland’s fastest-flowing and fastest-thinning glacier for the last 20 years, has made an unexpected about-face.

Jakobshavn is now flowing more slowly, thickening, and advancing toward the ocean instead of retreating farther inland. The glacier is still adding to global sea level rise – it continues to lose more ice to the ocean than it gains from snow accumulation – but at a slower rate.

The calving front of Jakobshavn Glacier, center. (NASA/OIB/John Sonntag)

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NASA data shows Arctic Sea Ice 2019 Wintertime Extent Is Seventh Lowest

March 22, 2019 |

Written by Maria-Jose Vinas
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual maximum extent after growing through the fall and winter. The 2019 wintertime extent reached on March 13th ties with 2007’s as the 7th smallest extent of winter sea ice in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.

This year’s maximum extent peaked at 5.71 million square miles (14.78 million square kilometers) and is 332,000 square miles (860,000 square kilometers) below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum – equivalent to missing an area of ice larger than the state of Texas.

A big lead, or opening in the sea ice pack, in the eastern Beaufort Sea, as seen from a NASA Operation IceBridge survey flight on Apr. 14, 2018. (NASA/Linette Boisvert)

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NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland mission still making discoveries

March 15, 2019 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – Only seven months after NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission wrapped its last field campaign on the world’s largest island, an OMG crew is back in Greenland to collect more data.

With two or three field projects a year since 2016, no wonder OMG has made the most comprehensive measurements yet of how ocean water lapping at the undersides of Greenland’s melting glaciers affects them. All that data has answered a lot of existing questions – and it’s raised plenty of new ones.

Cracks in the front of a glacier as it reaches the ocean. (NASA/Adam Klein)

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NASA Finds Possible Second Impact Crater Under Greenland Ice

February 13, 2019 |

Written By Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – This follows the finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier – the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth’s ice sheets. Though the newly found impact sites in northwest Greenland are only 114 miles apart, at present they do not appear to have formed at the same time.

If the second crater, which has a width of over 22 miles, is ultimately confirmed as the result of a meteorite impact, it will be the 22^nd largest impact crater found on Earth.

Just 114 miles from the newly-found Hiawatha impact crater under the ice of northwest Greenland, lies a possible second impact crater. The 22-mile wide feature would be the second crater found under an ice sheet, and if confirmed, would be the 22nd-largest crater on Earth. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Jefferson Beck)

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NASA studies elements that make a Stable Landslide into a disastrous one

February 8, 2019 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – “Stable landslide” sounds like a contradiction in terms, but there are indeed places on Earth where land has been creeping downhill slowly, stably and harmlessly for as long as a century. But stability doesn’t necessarily last forever.

For the first time, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and collaborating institutions have documented the transition of a stable, slow-moving landslide into catastrophic collapse, showing how drought and extreme rains likely destabilized the slide.

The Mud Creek landslide in photographic image. The radar velocity map shows the pre-collapse (solid line) and post-collapse (dashed line) extent of the sliding area, with faster sliding velocities before the collapse shown in darker shades of red. The highest velocities were about 16 inches (40 centimeters) per year. (Google/SIO/NOAA/U.S. Navy/NGA/GEBCO/Landsat/Copernicus)

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NASA study shows Asia’s Glaciers moving slower due to Ice Loss

December 16, 2018 |

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – A NASA-led, international study finds Asia’s high mountain glaciers are flowing more slowly in response to widespread ice loss, affecting freshwater availability downstream in India, Pakistan and China. Researchers analyzed almost 2 million satellite images of the glaciers and found that 94 percent of the differences in flow rates could be explained by changes in ice thickness.

For more than a decade, satellite data have documented that the glaciers were thinning as the melt rates on their top surfaces increased.

Glaciers in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, one of the mountain regions studied in the new research. (Université Grenoble Alpes/IRD/Patrick Wagnon)

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NASA reports Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Growth Slows, Long-term Decline

December 10, 2018 |

Written by Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.

As temperatures in the Arctic have warmed at double the pace of the rest of the planet, the expanse of frozen seawater that blankets the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas has shrunk and thinned over the past three decades. The end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent has almost halved since the early 1980s. A recent NASA study found that since 1958, the Arctic sea ice cover has lost on average around two-thirds of its thickness and now 70 percent of the sea ice cap is made of seasonal ice, or ice that forms and melts within a single year.

A lone Arctic sea ice floe, observed during the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project in October 2014. (NASA/Alek Petty)

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