Kan. team helps study sea level changes

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[A high tide in Kansas ?! ]

LAWRENCE, Kan. - In a cramped laboratory, graduate student Nazia Ahmed tinkers with a radar system that will soon withstand some of the harshest conditions on Earth. Across campus, Richard Hale is putting the final touches on a model of an unmanned aerial vehicle that will eventually carry Ahmed's contraption over the polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
Together, the University of Kansas researchers are part of a team at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, where they are developing new technology and computer models to measure and predict sea level changes resulting from the melting of polar ice sheets.
"Even half a meter to 1 meter of sea level rise is a serious issue," said Prasad Gogineni, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CReSIS. "The question right now is not whether the sea level is rising, it's a question of how fast and how much."
Last year, researchers discovered Antarctica's ice sheet has been losing 36 cubic miles — or more than 5 trillion cubic feet — of ice each year since early 2002.
NASA' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> NASA scientists say the total ice volume in Greenland is also diminishing, which could have dire consequences for the 4 million people who live in the world's polar regions.
"This is a long-term issue," said Gogineni, who began studying sea ice more than two decades ago. "The sea level rise issue may not be an immediate issue related to climate change, but on the long term it affects a lot of people."
Some scientists predict the ice sheets will disappear entirely by the end of this century, a point driven home in former presidential candidate
Al Gore' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." A portion of the film illustrates what major coastal cities such as New York and Beijing would look like if the Greenland ice sheet melts and sea levels rise.
But the film relies heavily on theory and conjecture, largely the result of sporadic core samples, satellite imaging and primitive radar measurements. Many locations are too remote to investigate, so what really lies beneath the ice is largely unknown.
CReSIS wants to find out.
Gogineni and his team are attempting to chart the thickness of the ice sheets, map their internal layers and determine whether a film of water lies between the ice sheets and bedrock, which would act as a lubricant and allow large chunks of ice to more easily slip to sea.
To do that, CReSIS is developing new radars and sophisticated sensors that can more accurately examine the polar ice sheets. Those radars will be carried on experimental, long-duration unmanned aerial vehicles and surface-based rovers that can withstand the brutal terrain and harsh conditions of the arctics.
"This is where real breakthroughs happen," said Hale, an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. "The science mission is completely driving the technology."
CReSIS is a multidisciplinary effort, encompassing researchers from all areas of academia and several universities.
Gogineni and his team are developing the radar systems and remote sensors, while Hale is leading a team responsible for carrying them. Another group is responsible for collecting data through satellite measurements, another for developing new modeling systems and yet another for putting all the information together.
Researchers from Penn State, the University of Maine, Elizabeth City State University, Haskell Indian Nations University and the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University are also working on the project. So are scientists in Denmark, Australia and England.
"We've tried to identify key problems in glaciology that require new technologies to address properly," said Ken Jezek of the Byrd Polar Research Center. "This project has been very fruitful for that reason."
The CReSIS project is funded by a $19 million grant in 2005 from the
National Science Foundation' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> National Science Foundation, with additional support from NASA. It's one of three projects the United States is contributing to a two-year study dubbed the International Polar Year.
"The polar regions are a place of exploration," said Chris Elfring, director of the Polar Research Board, one of the leaders of the Polar Year in the United States. "We're talking about asking questions that have never been asked before."
The Polar Year, sponsored by the United Nation's
World Meteorological Organization' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science, began March 1 and includes nearly 50,000 scientists from 63 nations. More than 220 expeditions have been planned over the next two years, and various national exploration agencies have promised about $1.5 billion in funding.
CReSIS plans two expeditions, one to map Greenland next year and the other to examine Antarctica in late 2008 and early 2009.
Gogineni said the expeditionary teams will include about 20 people, more than half of them students.
"One of the purposes of the center is to train the next generation of scientists and engineers," Gogineni said. "We realize the importance of developing that."
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