“GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) is continuing GRACE’s legacy of tracking Earth’s water movement across the planet. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, and changes in sea level provides a unique view of Earth’s climate and has far-reaching benefits for its people.”
“In 2018, NASA will intensify its focus on one of the most critical but remote parts of our changing planet with the launch of two new satellite missions and an array of airborne campaigns. GRACE-FO and ICESat-2 will use radically different techniques to observe how the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are changing over time and how much they are contributing to sea level rise.
The space agency is launching these missions at a time when decades of observations from the ground, air, and space have revealed signs of change in Earth’s ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers, snow cover, and permafrost. Collectively, scientists call these frozen regions of our planet the “cryosphere.”
Music: Pending News by Christian Telford
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/LK Ward