A successful land ice “Stancomb* Outboard” mission was completed by the OIB team today in the same general East Antarctic region as the previous two missions. The great weather in that area continued today, sunny, clear and calm for our flight. All OIB remote sensing instruments, (lidars, cameras, gravity, and radars) reported good data collection.
Onboard today’s flight was a CBS reporting team, filming the scenery and the instrument operations on NASA 817, as well as interviewing our land and sea ice scientists. I’ll let you all know if I hear about a broadcast date.
We also enjoyed our first satellite “chats” (during this deployment ) with 3 classrooms during today’s mission.
We’ll attempt another OIB mission tomorrow, weather permitting.
*Stancomb-Wills Glacier is a large glacier that debouches** into eastern Weddell Sea southward of Lyddan Island. The glacier was discovered in the course of the U.S. Navy LC-130 plane flight over the coast on November 5, 1967, and was plotted by United States Geological Survey (USGS) from photographs obtained at that time. The name was applied by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) in 1969.The Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue (75°0′S 22°0′W) is the extensive seaward projection of the Stancomb-Wills Glacier into the eastern Weddell Sea. The cliffed front of this feature was discovered in January 1915 by a British expedition led by Shackleton. He named it “Stancomb-Wills Promontory,” after Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, one of the principal donors of the expedition. In 1969, US-ACAN amended the name to “Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue”. This followed the U.S. Navy flight on which the glacier was discovered and the relationship with the glacier tongue was first observed.
**a debouch, or debouche, is a place where runoff from a small, confined space emerges into a larger, broader space.
A wide view of today’s flight track
Today’s flight track over Stancomb
The edge of the Stancomb Iceshelf as the DC8 passed overhead
Stancomb Iceshelf cracks
Snow covered crevasses and a wider crack in the Stancomb Iceshelf
And another crack just past the wide one.
Crevassing along the center flow of Stamcomb Glacier
CBS crew filming ATM’s Robbie Russell (me) in the DC8 forward cargo compartment where the ATM lidars are located over ports.
CBS crew filming ATM data collection systems
CBS crew filming OIB scientist Dr Linette Boisvert in the DC8 cabin
The edge of the Stancomb Iceshelf in the distance
The edge of the Stancomb Iceshelf as the DC8 passed overhead. The sea ice is the rough surface in the upper image, the darker smooth snow in the lower is the Iceshelf, looking straight down at the edge
The edge of the Stancomb Iceshelf as the DC8 began our climb to altitude on our way back to Punta Arenas.