Two New Satellites Set to Study One of Earth's Most Critically Changing Regions

n 2018, NASA will intensify its focus on one of the most critical but remote parts of our changing planet with the launch of two new satellite missions and an array of airborne campaigns.

GRACE-FO and ICESat-2 will use radically different techniques to observe how the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are changing over time and how much they are contributing to sea level rise.

The space agency is launching these missions at a time when decades of observations from the ground, air, and space have revealed signs of change in Earth's ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers, snow cover, and permafrost. Collectively, scientists call these frozen regions of our planet the "cryosphere."