What Is Operation IceBridge? Perfectly Rectangular Iceberg In the Antarctic

Air journey is considered to be the safest way to travel nowadays and most people still get excited at the name of air travel. But just imagine if such a unique incident happens during air travel which you would not have even imagined in the sky thousands of feet above the ground, then what will be your condition? Today we will introduce you to one such incident that took place during a survey flight launched by NASA.

You might know that ice plays an important role in climate change. But in what way are scientists capable of studying it? The first sattelite committed merely to gathering information about the world's ice was the ice, cloud, and land elevation satellite, better known as ICESat. But back in 2009, ICESat was retired due to a technical malfunction. And ICESat-2 didn't launch until nearly a decade later in 2018, so how have scientists studied the ice in the intervening time? So here comes Operation IceBridge which was introduced by NASA to "bridge the gap" between satellite missions to maintain annual observations of ice sheets and sea ice in the polar regions.

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Operation IceBridge was NASA's longest-running aerial survey of polar ice that flew over northern Antarctica in October 2018. The survey aircraft took off on Oct 16, 2018, to monitor the changes in the ice height of several glaciers. During the flight, IceBridge Senior Assistant Scientist Jeremy Harbeck spotted an iceberg floating amid sea ice off the Larsen C ice shelf and was quite surprised to see its natural structure. This iceberg was very sharp-angled and rectangular as if someone had cut it with a laser. As soon as the photo of this iceberg was posted on social media, it became viral, scientists themselves had seen such a rare sight for the first time.