Ice is viewed near the coast of West Antarctica from a window of a NASA Operation IceBridge airplane on October 28, 2016. The cracks hint at how fragile the sheets really are.
Climate Change Captured in Stunning Antarctic Ice Photos
NASA's IceBridge missions provide visual evidence of melting ice.
Climate change can be hard to visualize, because it tends to happen at a relatively creeping pace, not in one dramatic surge, as Hollywood often likes to depict.
But new photos from NASA flights provide a fresh look at melting ice. For the past eight years, NASA has been flying Operation IceBridge missions in research planes over the poles, in order to gather more visual data on the impact of warming temperatures.
To help make this work more accessible to the public, in late October, photographer Mario Tama flew on three of NASA's IceBridge flights over Western Antarctica and the surrounding sea ice, leaving out of Punta Arenas, Chile. The trip was timed to coincide with the start of the
