NASA engineers have come up with the groundbreaking mission of measuring how rapidly climate change is melting the ice sheets of Antarctica.
According to Voice of America, the engineers are designing a fleet of underwater robots that will not only measure how fatly the ice is melting but will also help in knowing its impact on the rising sea levels.
A US Navy laboratory camp in Artic tested a prototype of the submersible vehicles by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA near Los Angeles. They deployed it under North Alaska’s frozen Beaufort Sea in March 2024.
In a summary posted on NASA’s website, a JPL Robotics engineer and principal investigator for the IceNode project, Paul Glick, said, “These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth.”
Moreover, the objective behind deploying these probes is to get more accurate data that will allow scientists to advance computer models in predicting the upcoming sea level rise.
A JPL climate scientist, Ian Fenty, asserted, “The goal is getting data directly at the ice-ocean melting interface.”
Furthermore, an analysis published by JPL in 2022 revealed that Antarctica's ice shelf has melted by 12 trillion tonnes since 1977, which is double the previous estimates.
As per NASA, if Antarctica's ice self is melted completely, the global sea levels will be raised by an estimated 60 meters.
