NASA's Operation IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown
An aerial photograph of an iceberg shaped like the Matterhorn floating in Scoresby Sund along Greenland's eastern coast. The photo was taken during an Operation IceBridge flight on Apr. 21, 2018. (Source: NASA/Joe MacGregor) During my very first visit to the Arctic, the Sun did a lazy 360 above Tromsø, Norway each day. It was summer, and I was simply entranced by the midnight sun. But I wasn't really bitten by the Arctic bug until a visit the next winter. And what really got me was the light. Yes, the Arctic light in winter. Although the Sun doesn't rise for months at a time at that time of year, before it comes back (and also just after it departs) it spends a fair amount of time transiting just below the horizon. And so in January in Tromsø, the magic-hour light of sunrise and sunset lasted for hours, even without the Sun actually rising above the horizon. On snow-covered slopes ooverlooking Tromsø, and in the low, bluish light, the landscape was reduced to a Zen-like essence. The photograph above captures that same feel, I think. It was taken on April 21 of this year from a P-3 Orion aircraft during an overflight of Greenland, part of NASA's Operation IceBridge.
