Engineers who specialize in building NASA’s spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robotic probes to measure how quickly climate change is melting the vast ice caps around Antarctica and what that means for sea level rise.
The submarine prototype, which is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, was tested at the US Navy’s Arctic laboratory camp. It is distributed under the frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in the spring.
“These robots are a platform for bringing scientific instruments to the most inaccessible places on Earth,” said Paul Glick, JPL Robotics engineer and principal investigator; of the IceNode project, according to a summary published on NASA’s website.
The probes should provide more accurate data on the rate at which warming ocean water around Antarctica is melting the continent’s coastal ice, which will enable scientists to improve computer models for predicting future sea level rise.
The fate of the world’s largest ice sheet is the main focus of nearly 1,500 academics and researchers who gathered in southern Chile this week for the 11th conference of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research.
A 2022 JPL analysis found that thinning and breaking up of the Antarctic ice shelf has reduced its mass by about 12 trillion tons since 1997, twice as much as previous estimates.
If it melts completely, it would raise global sea levels by about 60 meters, according to NASA.