KU engineers, scientists and students depart for Antarctica for polar ice sheet research

A team of KU engineers, scientists and students left Mount Oread for the really down under —McMurdo Station, Antarctica — to study shrinking polar ice sheets.

The five-member team — the first of two from KU’s Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) — will take advantage of the Antarctic summer to conduct research at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core site, where they will collect data with advanced radar sensors developed as part of a larger Information Technology Research Project.

The National Science Foundation established CReSIS at KU this year with a $19 million grant. It is one of only two Science and Technology Centers established in 2005 in the nation. The center will develop new sensors, methods of collecting data, communication tools and modeling to better understand the mass balance of the world’s polar ice sheets and their contribution to global sea-level change. The center is led by Prasad Gogineni, PhD’84, Deane E. Ackers distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science at KU.

“The goal of the center … is to bring all the technology and tools together to really understand what is happening to the polar ice sheets and then model them,” said Gogineni.

Radars and other sensors developed by CReSIS engineers and scientists will be used to obtain a detailed image of the bed of the ice sheet and map deep and shallow internal layers to determine flow history and snow accumulation, respectively. KU researchers successfully demonstrated this technology on surface-based platforms at the summit of Greenland, whose ice sheet is more than three kilometers thick. For Antarctica, the technology needs to be further developed and miniaturized to fit on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, that can cover large-scale areas.

Currently available satellite technology provides researchers with information on ice sheet surface elevation. Scientists use this data to determine the growth or shrinkage of the ice caps and map the extent of surface melt and surface velocity of the ice flow.

“The satellite observations are definitely telling us that there are rapid changes taking place in some areas, but they aren’t telling us why,” said Gogineni. CReSIS’s mission is to help provide some answers through previously unavailable data and modeling that will help predict what will happen to the ice sheets and their impact on sea-level change.

Learn more about polar research efforts at www.cresis.ku.edu or www.ku-prism.org.