Space.com - NASA's most ambitious Arctic voyage to date has revealed surprisingly high concentrations of ice particles in clouds over Greenland, a clue that may help explain why Arctic ice is melting even faster than predicted.
"The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else on the planet, so the question we're trying to ask here is: Is the Arctic going to change fast — or really fast?" Patrick Taylor, the deputy science lead for the mission known as ARCSIX, for Arctic Radiation Cloud Aerosol Surface Interaction Experiment, told Space.com.
This bold mission to one of the world's most forbidding regions involved sending a small fleet of instrument-laden planes, including a NASA C-130 and a P-3 Orion, to dart through Arctic clouds and drop buoys into gaps in iceberg-laden waters below. While agency scientists are still studying the data, which was collected last summer, they say it's already clear that dust from Greenland's increasingly exposed landmass is melting vulnerable sea ice toward northern parts of the globe.
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