Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are developing a fleet of underwater robot probes to enhance understanding of climate change’s impact on Antarctica’s ice sheets and sea level rise. These probes, known as IceNodes, are designed to provide crucial data on how warming ocean waters are melting the continent’s coastal ice, which is vital for improving sea level rise predictions.
A prototype of these submersible robots was tested in March at a US Navy camp in the Arctic, beneath the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. Paul Glick, a JPL Robotics engineer leading the IceNode project, emphasized that these robots can reach the most challenging locations on Earth, delivering valuable scientific instruments to areas previously inaccessible.
The IceNodes are designed to measure the melting rates of ice shelves from beneath, offering more precise data than traditional satellite measurements. These ice shelves, which extend from the land into the sea, play a crucial role in holding back glaciers that would otherwise contribute significantly to sea level rise. The melting of these shelves has accelerated, with NASA’s 2022 analysis revealing that Antarctica’s ice shelf mass has decreased by approximately 12 trillion tons since 1997, a rate double previous estimates. If Antarctica’s ice shelves were to melt entirely, global sea levels could rise by about 200 feet (60 meters).
The cylindrical IceNodes, each about 8 feet (2.4 meters) long and 10 inches (25 centimeters) in diameter, will be released either from ice boreholes or from vessels at sea. They are designed to drift with ocean currents and navigate to critical “grounding zones” where the ice shelf meets the ocean and land—areas that are challenging for satellite signals to penetrate.
Once at their target location, the probes will deploy three-pronged “landing gear” to attach themselves to the underside of the ice shelf. They will then record data on seasonal fluctuations and other variables for up to a year before drifting back to the open sea to transmit their findings via satellite.
Earlier tests included deployments in California’s Monterey Bay and beneath the winter surface of Lake Superior in Michigan. The goal is to eventually deploy up to 10 probes to comprehensively study a single ice shelf cavity, though further development and testing are required before full-scale deployment can be planned.
These innovative probes aim to provide a deeper understanding of the ice-ocean interaction and help refine predictions of future sea level changes, which is crucial for addressing climate change’s global impacts.
