Glaciers and ice sheets shape Earth’s landscape, provide plants, animals, and people with water and important nutrients, and also significantly contribute to flooding and sea-level rise. Scientists tracking the changing size of glaciers and ice sheets calculate their mass balance, which is their net gain or loss over the course of a year. They gain mass through the accumulation of snow and ice; they lose mass through melting and calving icebergs into the ocean. Measuring the mass balance of glaciers and ice sheets provides important details for understanding trends in how much they are growing or melting, estimating the amount of freshwater they can provide now and in the future, and factor into calculating global sea-level rise.

Within NASA’s data holdings are accurate, efficient to use datasets collected by laser and other precision instruments researchers can use to easily make glacier and ice sheet mass balance calculations.