Quote:NASA’s Operation IceBridge Completes Eleven Years of Polar Surveys (Dec 11, 2019)

For eleven years from 2009 through 2019, the planes of NASA’s Operation IceBridge flew above the Arctic, Antarctic and Alaska, gathering data on the height, depth, thickness, flow and change of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets.



Designed to collect data during the years between NASA’s two Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellites, ICESat and ICESat-2, IceBridge made its final polar flight in November 2019, one year after ICESat-2’s successful launch.

As the team and planes move on to their next assignments, the scientists and engineers reflected on a decade of IceBridge’s most significant accomplishments.

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2019: The end of an era

In 2019, IceBridge continued flying in support of ICESat-2 for its Arctic and Antarctic campaigns. The hundreds of terabytes of data the team collected over the decade will fuel science for years to come.

“This data doesn’t get old,” Studinger said. “This data set we have right now will be incredibly valuable going into the future. It’s basically the only data set of its kind that we have.”

“Our data is freely available to anyone,” said project manager Eugenia De Marco. “I believe that, as humans, we are stewards of this planet, and as such, it is our responsibility to take care of it. The first step in that process is to find out what’s going on with the physical world so we can better address the challenges facing our planet. I believe IceBridge and the data it has collected helps answer the question of what’s going on, and that is one of the biggest contributions IceBridge has provided over the years.”

The campaign completed more than 900 flights between Greenland and Antarctica, and more than 150 in Alaska. While some members of the team changed over the decade, some have been with the project since its beginning.

“We had this incredible can-do attitude on both the instrument teams and the aircraft teams,” said Studinger, who was the project’s first lead scientist in 2009 and worked with the mission throughout the decade. “We might have been working really long days for 11 weeks straight in Greenland, but still, at 5 in the morning, people step on the airplane and say hello with a big smile on their face. It really speaks to the people, who for me, were the most enjoyable part – the IceBridge family.”

IceBridge finished its last polar flight on November 20, 2019. The team will complete one more set of Alaska flights in 2020.

“Operation IceBridge took what NASA had already learned how to do with planes at the poles and supersized it, with consistently successful airborne campaigns across the Arctic and Antarctic for eleven years straight,” said MacGregor. “While IceBridge was laser-focused on its primary objective – bridging the gap between ICESat and ICESat-2 – it was sufficiently big and broad in scope that it generated a momentum all its own, too. IceBridge opened the door to new ways of thinking about monitoring the polar regions and enabled numerous unexpected discoveries, and brought new scientists and new data types into the fold.”