Gepubliceerd op 25 september 2018
For climate scientists, the poles are ground zero. Around the North and South poles, climate change is happening faster and more dramatically.
To better understand how the entirety of Earth's climate will change as the planet warms, scientists need to resolve the many mysteries of polar climate change. NASA's newest ICE mission satellite, ICESat-2 -- scheduled to launch into space on Saturday morning -- will help scientists do just that.
Many of those mysteries are related to changes in sea ice coverage.
"We're losing more and more sea ice every year and we don't know why," Tom Wagner, ICESat-2 program scientist, told UPI.
NASA and other space and weather agencies have been measuring the movement and thickness of ice for a couple decades, but the instruments they've relied on are relatively blunt compared to ICESat-2.