Bridging a decade of data: NASA's massive airborne polar survey

Space · Published 20 October 2026 · Updated 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: When satellites go dark, aircraft take flight. To prevent a decade-long gap in tracking our changing planet, NASA launched Operation IceBridge—the largest airborne survey of polar ice ever flown. It provides the 3D blueprints needed to understand how glaciers and sea ice are reshaping our world.

Operation IceBridge was designed as a critical scientific bridge between two generations of satellite technology. When NASA's first Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) stopped collecting science data in 2009, the mission took over to ensure a continuous series of observations until ICESat-2 launched on September 15, 2018. By flying aircraft over the Arctic, Antarctic, and Alaska from 2009 through 2019, NASA maintained an unbroken record of ice height, depth, thickness, and flow.

The mission's scale far surpassed previous efforts like the Arctic Ice Mapping Project (AIM). Using a diverse fleet of planes—including P-3B aircraft—and more than a dozen instruments, scientists deployed elevation-mapping lasers, ice-penetrating radars, optical cameras, infrared sensors, gravimeters, and magnetometers. This multi-instrument suite allowed them to see beneath the surface, revealing information about the bedrock under the ice and mapping hundreds of miles of grounding lines where glaciers first lose contact with land and begin to float.

These measurements are vital for predicting sea level rise. By documenting fast and slow changes in ice sheets and tracking yearly fluctuations in sea ice thickness, researchers can create more accurate models of glacier contributions to global oceans. Furthermore, the mission addressed a specific mystery: why Southern Hemisphere sea ice is not following the same steady decline observed in the Arctic. Because there are no weather stations in regions like the Weddell Sea, these airborne transects provide the only reliable data for climate modeling.

The project concluded its final polar flights in November 2019, just one year after ICESat-2 became operational. It successfully transitioned from a temporary gap-filler to a decade-long repository of high-resolution data on Earth's rapidly changing cryosphere.

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