NASA Rover Prototype Set To Explore Greenland Ice Sheet

NASA’s newest scientific rover is set for testing May 3 through June 8 in the highest part of Greenland.

The robot is known as GROVER.  It stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research. It will roam the frigid landscape. All at collecting measurements to help scientists better understand changes in the massive ice sheet.

This autonomous, solar-powered robot carries a ground-penetrating radar to study how snow accumulates, adding layer upon layer to the ice sheet over time.

Greenland’s surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012. All when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting. That’s across about 97 percent of the ice sheet.

As written before, Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than previously thought, according to research published Wednesday by U.S. scientists. The data shows the rate of loss accelerated from 2004 to 2006. Especially with the massive ice. All melting two and one-half times faster than the previous two-year period.

Analysis of satellite observations show that Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to April 2006. More over this melting is more than the volume of water in Lake Erie.

As I read once on Hugg which doesn’t exist says the massive glaciers are deteriorating twice as fast as they were five years ago.

So Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., expect GROVER to tell us things. It will also detect the layer of the ice sheet that formed. Especially in the aftermath of that extreme melt event.

Research with polar rovers costs less than aircraft or satellites, the usual platforms.

Source: NASA

Now the Guardian reports Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer.

Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to data.

That means sea level rises are also likely to reach 67cm by 2100, about 7cm more than the IPCC’s main prediction. Such a rate of rise will put 400 million people at risk of flooding every year. That’s consequently instead of the 360 million predicted by the IPCC, by the end of the century.