Researchers in the Stanford Radio Glaciology lab use radio waves to understand rapidly changing ice sheets and their contributions to global sea-level rise.
Researchers in the Stanford Radio Glaciology lab use radio waves to understand rapidly changing ice sheets and their contributions to global sea-level rise. This technique has revealed groundwater beneath Greenland, the long-term impacts of extreme melt, a process that could accelerate ice sheet mass loss in Antarctica, the potential instability of an ice sheet that could raise sea levels by 10 feet, and more.
Now, PhD students within the group have created an open-source tool that others can use to make ice-penetrating radar systems, core instruments in the field of glaciology. The Open Radar Code Architecture (ORCA) offers scientists a cheaper, easier, and more efficient way to build both airborne and ground-based radars, even if they lack a technical engineering background. Ice-penetrating radars can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the lowest-cost version of the team’s open-source radar costs only $1,500.
“We’re enabling groups to build exactly the right instrument for what they’re trying to do,” said PhD student Thomas Teisberg, who developed the system along with Anna Broome, PhD ’24.
Read more at: Stanford University
In Svalbard, researchers launch a device with an ice-penetrating radar system built around the Open Radar Code Architecture (ORCA), an open-source tool that allows scientists to build radars more cheaply and efficiently. (Photo Credit: Eliza Dawson)
