Rignot Research Group

We present a new, reference, comprehensive, high-resolution, digital mosaic of ice motion in Greenland assembled from satellite radar interferometry data acquired during the International Polar Year 2008 to 2009 by the Envisat Advanced Synthetic-Aperture Radar (ASAR), the Advanced Land Observation System (ALOS)'s Phase-Array L-band SAR (PALSAR) and the RADARSAT-1 SAR that covers 99% of the ice sheet in area. More detail here.

Two new Earth System Science Data Records, which were generated at the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine in collaboration with Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are now available for download at NSIDC:

Huge rivers of ice that flow into the sea from deep within Antarctica have been mapped for the first time.

The breakthrough could be crucial in tracking future sea levels as part of the battle against climate change, according to the scientists who undertook the study.

A team led by Professor Eric Rignot from the University of California at Irvine produced a 'jigsaw' of the glacial formations using data from European, Japanese and Canadian satellites.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study -- the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass -- suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.

See the full story at http://www.ess.uci.edu/news/searise201103

UCI/NASA study finds submarine erosion plays major, previously overlooked, role.

Glaciers in West Greenland are melting 100 times more rapidly at their end points beneath the ocean than they are at their surfaces, according to a UC Irvine/NASA study published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

See full story at http://www.ess.uci.edu/news/20100217rignot