This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated.
The Glacier Studies Project included two active tasks: Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World Task and a Coastal-Change and Glaciological Maps of Antarctica Task. The two tasks were inter-discipline, inter-agency, and international in scope and institutional involvement. Glaciers are one of the four subelements of the cryosphere [the other three are snow cover, floating ice (sea, lake, and river ice), and permafrost]. The cryosphere is particularly sensitive to changes in regional and global climate. Changes in the volume of glacier ice on land produces changes in global (eustatic) sea level. Seasonal changes in sea ice and snow cover and decadal changes in glacier area can be monitored regionally and globally with Simage and other data from Earth-orbiting satellites. NASA (Goddard Space Flight Center), USGS (Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center), and Icelandic National Energy Authority scientists were collaborating on satellite remote-sensing studies of glaciers.