3... 2... 1... Liftoff for NASA space laser

An article in Science magazine about the Sept. 15 launch of the $1 billion Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite – also known as ICESat-2 – that will measure how high polar ice is piled and how it is subsiding as ice melts or slides into the oceans interviews Beata Csatho, professor and chair of geology, about the limitations of an airplane-based campaign called IceBridge, which worked well for measuring ice in Greenland but could not cope with the vast expanse of Antarctica. “For Antarctica, this gap is really huge. We really don’t know what’s happened,” she said.

Read more: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/nasa-space-laser-will-track-earth-s-melting-poles-and-disappearing-sea-ice