Beneath The Ice Sheets

It's rare that an academic researcher gets to experience the life of a stunt pilot, but we found ourselves in more or less that position this past May, as we flew over the ice-covered fjords of southeast Greenland. It was exhilaratingand a little scary. We were riding in one of NASA's research aircraft, a P-3 Orion turboprop, on which we had installed a special kind of radar for probing glacial ice. Although our equipment can work at higher altitudes, other science instruments needed to be flown low, over terrain so rugged that at times we came within a mere 30 meters of the ridgesnear misses that our downward-looking radar measured for us while we peered out the window holding our breath. © 2006 IEEE.