just in ...... Scientists Turn to Drones For Closer Look at Sea Ice

The sun has finally risen above the horizon in the Arctic after months of darkness. That means the floating ice that clogs the world’s northernmost seas every winter is beginning to loosen and it’s time forChristopher Zappa to head for the town of Ny-Ålesund, in the Svalbard Archipelago, a group of islands located about halfway between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole.

Zappa, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, wants to understand the details of exactly how sea ice breaks up and melts, and he is going to call on a quintessentially 21st century technology to help him do it. Zappa is among a small group of scientists globally who are pioneering the use of “unmanned airborne systems” — or drones, to you and me — in a campaign to better understand Earth’s changing climate.

Svalbard is an ideal place for Zappa’s studies. The islands lie astride Fram Strait, where sea ice blowing out of the Arctic Ocean streams southward every summer: breakup and melting are going constantly there from April through September. By September, the ice will dwindle to its annual minimum extent — a minimum that has trendeddramatically downward since the late 1970s, largely as a result of global warming. The open water exposed as the ice melts absorbs solar energy that would otherwise bounce back into space, further heating the planet.