“THE situation may be much worse than we thought,” says Duncan Wingham of University College London, about the rapid melting of Arctic ice due to global warming. “There simply hasn’t been a change like this for the past million years.”
It is to keep tabs on the depth of floating sea ice in the Arctic that Wingham’s team designed CryoSat, due to be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on 8 October from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia.
CryoSat’s radar-based instruments will also measure the ice cover in the Antarctic, Greenland and Alaska. The mission has gained in urgency following observations showing that the annual melt of Arctic ice now occurs earlier than ever before (see “Arctic ice shrinking as it feels the heat).
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The launch will be watched closely by ESA, as this will be the first of its satellites to be carried by a Rockot launch vehicle, a hybrid built from a modified intercontinental ballistic missile and an upper stage designed to carry satellites into orbit.
