On Nov. 4, 2010, the DC-8 flew over South Pole Station, a research station at Earth's geographic South Pole, before heading back to IceBridge's mission base in Punta Arenas, Chile. Credit: Digital Mapping System (DMS) group.
On Nov. 5, IceBridge flew a newly designed mission over West Antarctica's Getz Ice Shelf, completing the fifth flight of the Antarctic 2010 campaign.
The survey supplements a similar flight made in 2009, this time with an additional focus on gravity-oriented measurements along the shelf and across the "flux gate" – an imaginary line through which scientists calculate ice loss.
The flight follows a successful, high-altitude mission on Nov. 4, when crew flew an arc-shaped path around the South Pole.
The flight path combined with a similar flight from 2009 intersects nearly 70 percent of orbits from the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, providing researchers with data to calibrate ice sheet surface elevation measurements.
Before heading back to the mission's base in Punta Arenas, Chile, the DC-8 flew over the South Pole Station (above), a research station at Earth's geographic South Pole.
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