OIB

Mission: North Bed Gap 01
Priority: High

Mission: ICESat-2 Arctic Ocean #1 (racetrack)
Priority: Baseline

Mission: Zigzag East
Priority: High

This mission is a repeat or near-repeat of an OIB flight flown in prior years. It is intended to sample the thick multi-year ice near the Greenland coast as well as the gradient to thinner ice closer to the pole. The eastern- and westernmost gradient lines are CryoSat-2 ground tracks. In addition to Level 1 Requirements SI1 and SI2, the mission addresses sea ice level 1 baseline requirement SI3b by sampling thick multi-year ice near the northern coast of Greenland and the poleward gradient towards thinner ice.

Mission: Zachariæ-79N
Priority: Baseline

Mission: ICESat-2 Devon
Priority: High

This is the last year for Operation IceBridge, NASA’s most comprehensive airborne survey of ice change. Since the launch of its first Arctic campaign in spring 2009, IceBridge has enabled discoveries ranging from water aquifers hidden within snow in southeast Greenland, to the first map indicating where the base of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet is thawed, to detailed depictions of the evolving Arctic sea ice cover and the thickness of the overlying snow.

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.

A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland. 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.