NASA HEADS TO ARCTIC TO MEASURE ICE

THE GIST:

• NASA is sending a team of scientists to Greenland to assess polar ice.
• The information will be fed into models used to predict how climate changes will impact Earth.
• These missions fill in the gap in data from the loss of NASA's ice-monitoring satellite.

NASA has a new tradition for the annual rites of spring: aerial assessments of Arctic sea ice, considered by many scientists to be ground zero for charting climate change.

"The polar regions are very sensitive to the changes in climate," said Michael Studinger, with the Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center at the University of Maryland. "Any kind of changes we see happening much sooner at the poles than at any other latitude."