Mount Erebus is located on Ross Island, just a few miles from the largest research station in Antarctica, McMurdo Station. It's the most extreme Antarctic Extreme. It just makes you get a sense of how small you are in the grand scheme of things. So it's this pretty hulking mass of a volcano. The southernmost active volcano in the world. There is hot magma right pretty much beneath our feet. Floating ice appears flat and smooth like the ice in this image from NSIDC.- This is Mount Erebus in Antarctica. High resolution satellite image of Roosevelt Island in the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. Sea ice influences our Earth’s climate, and holds a critical place in the food web in these regions. ![]() Unlike the ice sheet, which forms over land, sea ice freezes directly on the surface of the ocean when the temperature is cold enough. Icepod and the LC-130 return to Willie Field and begin immediately to plan for the next flight.Įa ice covers much of the polar oceans both in the Arctic and Antarctic during the winter months. It is almost 50 years later, and while we have a much better understanding of Antarctica, there remains so much that is unexplored. Icepod overflew the best fishing hole on the Ross Ice Shelf while the team looked at the pictures of the bright eyed fish in the Science paper and smiled. That team also captured pictures of fish beneath the ice shelf demonstrating that the area below was not the wasteland that it was originally believed to be. When the RISP team, which included Lamont's Stan Jacobs, drilled through J9 in the 1970s they found refrozen ice with a structure that resembled waffles. In some places there was evidence of ice being added to the bottom of the shelf. The variation in the reflection from the bottom of the ice probably represented the different processes occurring at the ice sheet base. Crossing over Roosevelt Island the change from floating shelf ice, to marginal crevasses (deep cuts or openings in the ice) to ice sitting directly on the bedrock was imaged. The collected radar data showed remarkable variability over the ice. Along the shelf edge sections of thinner sea ice appear grey on the water surface. Icepod flying over the front of the Ross Ice Shelf. Icepod would then fly back toward McMurdo along a line where there are plans for another science project to drill next year. The plan was to cross the front of the ice shelf towards Roosevelt Island, fly inland until the plane cross the J9 site where the first hole through the ice shelf was drilled in the early 1970s as part of the Ross Ice Shelf Project (RISP). The instrument will be critical for determining the water depth beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, the least explored piece of ocean floor on our planet. ![]() Housed separately inside the plane the gravimeter requires a very stable platform. The gravimeter is a new addition to the Icepod suite of instruments. The goal of the six and a half hour mission was to test how the Icepod could image the varying processes at the base of the ice shelf and how well the gravimeter would work flying 90m/sec. Along the ~ 600 kilometer front edge of the shelf the ice towers at up to 50 meters in height a sheer vertical wall of white and the iridescent blue of compressed ice. It is several hundred meters thick, although most of this is below the water surface. The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest of the Antarctic ice shelves, measuring just under the size of the state of Texas.
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