AP / Mel Evans

In this file photo, Chuck Feld of West Chester, Pa., works on his sand art during a sandcastle contest in New Jersey. New research shows that just a dash of water is all that's needed to hold together the sand grains.

Just in time for the dog days of summer, scientists have revealed the winning formula for sturdy, sky-piercing sandcastles. The secret ingredient is a dash of water.

Daniel Bonn, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues explain that water is necessary to form capillary forces that help sand grains bridge, or stick together.

While we all know that some water is necessary to turn the dry sand between our toes into suitable building material, the new research shows that just 1 percent water by volume is the perfect amount.

Less surprising, the team also found the wider the base, the higher a sandcastle can reach into the sky before buckling under its own weight.

Using the optimum mixture of water and base, sandcastles reaching 16 feet high are possible, according to the research published Thursday in Scientific Reports. 

Pakpour et al / Scientific Reports

Using commercially available hydrophobic sand, it is possible to build an underwater sandcastle.

What’s more, the team found that even taller sandcastles are possible when using water-repellant sand (yes, there is such a thing) and building the structures underwater. 

“In this case the air and not the water ‘wets’ the grains and we can simply interchange water and air, which does not change the bridge force,” the team reports. 

“This makes it possible to build underwater sandcastles, which are even more spectacular than normal ones."

In case you’re wondering why university scientists are spending their time building sandcastles, they say their research has practical importance to civil engineers dealing with soil mechanics.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website.

The future of robots is shaping up to be wonderful for couch potatoes: they can fetch beers, fold laundry, and now they can even bake cookies.

This latest breakthrough comes from the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT, where graduate student Mario Bollini is plugging away at code that allows robots to make decisions for themselves as they accomplish specific tasks.

The Bakerbot, which is a Willow Garage PR2 robot, represents a hybrid approach to this end goal, he said. The robot knows, for example, that four bowls with cookie ingredients are on the table as well as a mixing bowl and a cookie sheet.

"All the manipulation is done on the fly," he said. It calculates, for example, how to pick up the bowls with ingredients and pour them into the mixing bowl, mix them together, and put them in the oven. The result is a baked cookie — not the prettiest cookie in the world, but nevertheless a baked cookie.

Ultimately, researchers would like to use the knowledge (and code) gained from this Bakerbot project and use it to design a robot that would know what to do when asked to bake a cake, for example.

"It would try to understand that, find a recipe for that, and it would try to understand what the recipe is telling it to do and then use actions that it knows how to do to accomplish it," Bollini said.

Beyond baking, robots with these types of skills are already being eyed for factory jobs. Current robots on the assembly line are programmed to do one task over and over again. If someone gets in its way, they get hit. And if they need to do a different task, they have to be completely reprogrammed.

A more dynamic robot could be useful, for example, on an auto assembly line where robots install windshields of all shapes and sizes on several different models of cars and do so without crashing into each other and their human colleagues.

In the more distant future, Bakerbot really might find its home inside a home, particularly for elder care in countries with aging populations such as Japan, Bollini noted. There, they'll likely start out doing cooperative tasks, not baking cookies all by themselves.

"If you're not strong enough to lift the mixing bowl and put it out, the robot will do that part of the task and then the human does things that are easier for the person to do, like recognize where everything is and get it out of the cupboards," he said.

This result might actually be the prettiest cookie in the world.

This report was originally published as "Robot Makes Cookies From (Almost) Scratch" in msnbc.com's "Future of Tech" special section.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Terrafugia

Terrafugia's Transition roadable aircraft, shown here in an artists' rendering, has cleared regulatory hurdles that make it street legal.

A flying car is being exempted from regulatory hurdles, meaning future owners of the vehicle will be able to drive it on public streets, the company behind it recently announced.

What this means is that you'll be able to legally sit in traffic with the rest of the street-legal cars, but have a slight grin as you head home from the general aviation airport where you landed after flying over traffic for the first 20 miles of your commute.

"Think of it as an airplane that drives, not a car that flies," Anna Mracek Dietrich, the chief operating officer of Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass.,-based company that is making the Transition roadable aircraft, told me in an email Thursday.

"Once on the ground, the pilot can fold the wings on his Transition with the push of a button, drive home, and park in their garage."

The exemptions granted from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration allow the company to use windshields made of lightweight polycarbonate materials rather than heavier traditional laminated automotive safety glass and tires that are not normally allowed on multi-purpose vehicles.

The Transition's tires are rated for highway speeds and the vehicle's weight and fit in the same classification as SUVs and light trucks, Dietrich explained, but they weigh only a fraction of other tires in its class. The exemption makes this OK.

Last year, the vehicle was granted a weight exemption that allows it to be classified as a Light Sport Aircraft by the FAA even though it is 110 pounds too heavy for that rating.

The clearing of these regulatory hurdles will allow Terrafugia to begin delivery of the Transition when it is ready for commercial production next year.

More on flying cars:

• 'Flying car' goes to market
• Flying car lifts off in maiden flight
• 'Flying car' concept gets a design tweak
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

State University of New York

Michael Amadori looks into a fish tank growing tilapia in a lab at the State University of New York. The fish waste is used to grow lettuce.

If, in a few years, you are suddenly overcome with a sense that there's something fishy about the lettuce in your salad, you might be on to something. There's a chance it was grown with fish poop.

"There's no fish taste whatsoever," Michael Amadori, a master's student in ecological engineering at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, assured me Wednesday.

For now, Amadori is growing the futuristic lettuce in question as part of a science experiment aimed at closing the loop between the food we throw away and the food we eat.

Americans throw out about 25 percent of their food, he noted, a fact that led him to ask: "Can I take this waste product in our society and turn it into a value-added product?"

To find out, he's set up an experiment where he feeds dried food waste from a student cafeteria to fish in freshwater tanks and uses the fish poop to grow Boston Bibb lettuce.

The concept is called "aquaponics," a combination of fish farming and hydroponics (growing vegetables without soil). Though not new, this is the first time it has been tried with post-consumer food waste to feed fish.

Most aquaponic systems, Amadori said, spend about 50 percent of their operating budget on commercial fish feed, which is typically pellets made from ground up fish, corn, and vitamins.

So, while systems such as the Massachusetts Avenue Project in Buffalo, N.Y., and Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wis., are great socially and environmentally, "they are having trouble making a profit," Amadori said.

His experiment is set up in a greenhouse where tilapia, a hardy freshwater fish that will eat just about anything, is raised in half a dozen 55-gallon barrels holding 20 fish each.

The cafeteria food waste is ground up, dried, and broken up into pellets that are fed to the fish in three of the tanks. The other fish are fed commercial pellets as a control factor.

Temperature-controlled water from the fish tanks is cycled into graveled-filled containers where the lettuce grows.

"The gravel bed has bacteria that convert the fish waste into plant food and then the plants remove that and the water returns (to the fish tank) clean," Amadori explained.

The experiment has been running for about four months. The fish won't be harvested until they weigh around a pound, at about one year of age. The lettuce, however, is abundant.

"I'm making 18 heads a week and it is delicious," Amadori said. "It tastes just like the lettuce you buy at the grocery store."

More on sustainable food:

• Fishing for food solutions, aquaponics offers clues
• Could vertical farming be the future?
• Rooftops take urban farming to the skies
• U.S. OKs large fish farms in Gulf of Mexico

Joel Graham, University of Maryland

A 94°C geothermal pool, with a level-maintaining siphon, near Gerlach, Nevada. Sediment from the floor of this pool was enriched on pulverized miscanthus at 90°C and subsequently transferred to filter paper in order to isolate microbes able to subsist on cellulose alone.

A record-breaking microbe that thrives while munching plant material at near boiling temperatures has been discovered in a Nevada hot spring, researchers announced in a study published today.

Scientists are eyeing the microbe's enzyme responsible for breaking down cellulose — called a cellulase — as a potential workhouse in the production of biofuels and other industrial processes.

Cellulose is a chain of linked sugar molecules that makes up the woody fiber of plants. To produce biofuels, enzymes are required to breakdown cellulose into its constituent sugars so that yeasts can then ferment them into the type of alcohol that makes cars (not people) go vroom.

At the industrial scale, this process is done most efficiently at high temperatures that kill other microbes that could otherwise contaminate the reaction, Douglas Clark, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, told me today.

"So finding cellulases that can operate at those temperatures are of interest," he said.

Hot spring
That's what led Clark, microbiologist Frank Robb from the University of Maryland, and colleagues to collect sediment and water samples from the Great Boiling Springs near Gerlach, Nevada. The spring is 203 degrees F, just short of boiling.

"It's on private land and has been surrounded by a low wall to keep cattle from going into it and that maintains the temperature," Robb explained to me today, noting that most hot springs have varying temperatures depending on the weather and water levels in the spring.

In addition, a siphon has been added to Gerlach hot spring to keep it from overflowing. The combination gives whatever microbes that are in there no choice but to grow at high temperatures, Robb noted. Bits of grass and woody material blown into the spring serve as a food source.

The team grew microbes found in the samples on pulverized miscanthus, a type of grass that is a common biofuel feedstock, to isolate the microbes that grow with plant fiber as their only source of carbon.

They then sequenced the community of surviving microbes, which indicated three species of Archaea, a type of single celled microorganism, were able to utilize cellulose as food. Genetic techniques identified the specific cellulase involved in the breakdown of cellulose.

This cellulase, dubbed EBI-244, was found in the most abundant of the three Archaea.

"We didn't really expect to find an organism that could grow at such a high temperature and degrade cellulose in this particular environment. But you never know," Clark told me. "It really underscores the diversity of life. And, obviously, if you don't look, you won't find it."

Too hot
The enzyme EBI-244 works optimally at 228 degrees F (109 degrees C), which is actually too hot for the efficient breakdown of cellulose into fermentable sugars due to side reactions that can occur, Clark noted.

"But it is interesting to know that such cellulases are out there," Clark said. "And then this cellulase might also serve as a good starting point to be engineered to work at a lower temperature but maintain the high stability that it has naturally evolved to work at such high temperatures."

Robb likened this engineering process to building a street car from parts used on cars found at the racetrack. "The enzyme itself could be the parts bin," he said.

So, the enzyme itself probably won't be hard at work anytime soon producing fuel to put in your gas tank, but it does lead researchers down the road to engineering the biofuels of the future. What's more, EBI-244 is a record holder for heat tolerance in cellulase.

"It is always nice to have a record breaker," Clark noted. "It adds to that wow factor a little bit."

A paper on the findings appears in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature Communications. Other authors are Dana C. Nadler, Sarah Huffer, Harshal A. Chokhawala and Harvey W. Blanch of UC Berkeley; and Sara E. Rowland of the University of Maryland Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Sciences graduate program.

More on heat-loving microbes:

• Yellowstone microbe converts light to energy
• Got milk? Convert it into biofuel
• How bacteria could help power the future
• How biology will help fill your fuel tank
• Hole-y Cow! Guts could lead to holy grail for cheap biofuels
• Not-so-stupid microbe tricks

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Airport body scanning technology has been adapted to help shoppers quickly find better fitting clothes. The device is based on technology initially designed to protect air travelers.

The wide deployment of millimeter wave full-body scanners at airports around the U.S. caused a kerfuffle largely because they generate grainy photos of travelers' naked bodies. Will a makeover of the technology that promises to help put clothes on your body get a different reception?

If preliminary results from a beta test of the technology are a guide, the answer is yes.

"The feedback has been phenomenal from customers as to the helpfulness of the service to them," Elizabeth Thomas, a marketing executive with Unique Solutions Limited, told me today.

The company licensed the body-scanning technology from Batelle, a research organization that manages the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where the technology was first developed, and deployed the first "mybestfit" kiosk at the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania.

The millimeter wave technology uses radio waves to penetrate clothing and bounce signals off the body that get transferred to a computer where the data generates useful information.

At airports, the data is used to make a somewhat naked-body image that helps security personnel identify objects such as ceramic knives and other non-metallic weapons. At the mall, "there's no image involved whatsoever," Thomas said.

Rather, a computer software program uses the signals to generate measurement data from all over your body: arm and leg length, waist and hip size, weight, etc., and then matches that data up with fitting fashions available at the mall.

The shopping potential of the technology was demonstrated to reporters at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2007. The deployment at the Pennsylvania mall is the beginning of what Unique Solutions Limited hopes will be a trend that allows us all to be a bit more smartly dressed for stress.

More on body scanners:

• Scanning for security – and the perfect jeans
• Are airport X-ray scanners harmful
• Leaked U.S. Marshal body scan images revealed
• Airport body scanners reveal all

Rachel Strohm

Lake Kivu harbors huge reservoirs of methane and carbon dioxide gas that could power Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But gas could also explode, killing everything in and around the lake.

The depths of Africa's Lake Kivu harbor untold quantities of carbon dioxide and methane gases that could provide abundant electricity to millions of Rwandans and Congolese settling along its shores. But those gases could suddenly release, killing everything in and around the lake.

"Understanding whether you can find scenarios that would lead to something like that, a catastrophic release of gas, is of course important," Anthony Vodacek, a remote sensing scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, told me on Monday.

He is leading a two-year survey that aims, for the first time, to provide a scientific portrait of the entire lake system. The team consists of seismologists, biologists, remote sensing specialists, and other scientists who will combine their areas of expertise to provide a baseline understanding of the system.

"If you don't know what the starting point is, you don't know what the change is. And so that is part of what we'd like to establish here," Vodacek said.

Methane extraction
The Rwandan government has already built a power plant along the lake's shores which siphons methane from the depths of the lake to generate 3.6 megawatts of electricity, about 4 percent of the country's needs. The aim, eventually, is to generate several hundred megawatts.

Lake Kivu is one three known so-called explosive lakes in the world. The other two are in Cameroon. Lake Nyos experienced an explosive eruption in 1986 that killed 1,500 people. During these so-called overturning scenarios, something triggers the gases trapped in the depths to burst towards the surface.

The gas is trapped at the bottom of the lake because the streams that feed the lake are slightly brackish. Salty water is denser than freshwater and so, it sinks to the bottom, taking all the organic detritus with it that releases carbon dioxide as it decomposes.

In addition, the lake is in a seismically active region. "It is a rift valley lake," Vodacek noted. "The Africa continent is pulling apart … and that means there are fault lines, there are earthquakes, and those can be tied in to potential triggers for what goes with the lake overturning."

It's possible that people extracting the gases to generate electricity will stave off a catastrophic overturning of the lake, though it could also upset the stability of the lake, Vodacek noted. That's one of the questions the team wants answered.

Extraction of the methane to generate electricity could be a huge benefit for development in the region, Vodacek noted. Currently, most of the cooking fuel comes from forests around the lake, the same forests that are home to endangered mountain gorillas.

"Normally, you don't think of development as having positive impacts, but in this you could because it could turn people away from cutting down the forest and subsistence farming on these steep hillsides in the region," he said.

If the lake becomes a source of fuel, then conservationists can focus reforestation efforts in the surrounding hills and help protect the gorillas, Vodacek added.

Explosive history
Team member Robert Hecky, an aquatic biologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, performed an analysis of a sediment core from Lake Kivu in the 1970s and found evidence for catastrophic overturns about once every 1,000 years beginning about 5,500 years ago.

This finding corresponds with genetic evidence from cichlids, freshwater fish that first evolved in the lake. Today, only about 15 species are found in the lake, though thousands more species are in other lakes.

People looking at the molecular clock of these fish put two and two together and realized the Lake Kivu fish experienced an extinction about 5,000 years ago, "which coincides with the analysis of the sediment and the overturning of the lake," Vodacek said.

Hecky and other team members will bring advances in the study of lake sediment cores to refine the timeline of the overturning events and perhaps gain insight to the triggers such as landslides or volcanic activity.

Seismologists on the team will embrace advances in GPS sensors to get a detailed read on the rifting process in the valley to understand where fractures and fault lines are located.

Vodacek, who is leading the effort, will take a view from the sky to piece all the data together.

In particular, he is embracing recently released data sets of satellite imagery from NASA that provides nearly 40 years worth of data on the region, showing how the landscape has changed as people settled on the lakeshore and cut down the forests.

"You're always hearing these horror stories of natural resource development without any regard to the environmental impacts of that," he said. "Here's a case where we would like to go in and make sure there's necessary due diligence to make sure that things aren't destroyed as a resource is developed."

More on Africa energy and conservation

• Rwanda harnesses energy from exploding lake
• Deal struck to protect Congo mountain gorillas
• Scientists say eruption in Congo imminent
• Scientists: Inbreeding helps African fish

Roy Caldwell

The abilty of peacock mantis shrimp to see circularly polarized light has inspired engineers to develop technology that may improve CDs and DVDs.

The future of CD and DVD technology may be found in the eyes of peacock mantis shrimp, an international team of engineers recently reported.

The shrimp are one of the few animals in the world that are able to see circularly polarized light, the type of light used to make 3-D movies.

Scientists believe this ability is related to sexual signaling, Roy Caldwell, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told me on Friday.

"The strongest circularly polarized signal is certainly displayed during courtship and the assumption is it is important," he said.

The evidence for the ability to detect the circularly polarized light is based on Odontodactylus cultrifer, a relative of the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus). The eyes of the peacock mantis shrimp are similar and easier to obtain for study.

Aklesh Lakhtakia, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Pennsylvania State University, looked at these eyes in a bid to build a better waveplate.

"Polarization (or polarization state) is a property of light that human eyes do not appreciate but the eyes of many other animals do," he added.

"Waveplates are needed to either undo significant depolarization or to separate light of different polarization states. Of course, one also needs waveplates to filter light (generated by a source) of only a specific polarization to enter an optical device."

These devices are typically made from minerals such as quartz, calcite, or birefringent polymers. In some cases, to create the range and transparency required, two different materials are stacked or joined. Sometimes, though, this type of construction delaminates – it comes apart at the seams.

The method pioneered by Lakhtakia and colleagues with the National Taipei University of Technology, mimics the lens construction of peacock mantis shrimp.

These multilayered materials are suitable for waveplates in the visible light spectrum and cannot delaminate because they are manufactured as one piece.

The waveplate consists of two layers of nanorods; each layer deposited using different methods. One method produces a layer of needle-like nanorods that are parallel to each other and all slanted in the same direction. The second method produces parallel nanorods that are upright.

"The two separate layers are needed so that we can play off one against the other to achieve the desired polarization without significantly reducing transmittance over a broad range of frequencies," Lakhtakia said in a news release.

For now "we have just found a way to make an achromatic waveplate," Lakhtakia told me. The details are provided in the June 21 issue of Nature Communications. "Over time it will become part of optical systems," he added.

More on data storage and bioinspiration:

• It's 2010 and data storage tech is still in flux 
• Data storage gets image makeover 
• Animal eyes inspire new technology 
• When optical discs go bad 
• Swarm intelligence inspired by animals 
• Airplanes of the future could be self healing 

Courtesy of N. Metzl

Scientists have found marine plankton in the Southern Ocean will increase production of a smelly gas in response to global climate change.

Parts of the global oceans may get smellier thanks to global warming, according to a recent study.

The culprit is increased production of a sulfur-containing compound by marine plankton called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS. The sea-air smell is described variably as like cabbage or fishy and tangy.

Its link to marine plankton has been known for a while, and in 2007 scientists identified the genes responsible for its production.

Climate scientists are interested in the smelly gas for more reasons than just tickling their inner child: it is a major precursor for aerosols that trigger cloud formation and reflect sunlight back to space.

The new study finds that "DMS is locally much more sensitive to climate change than in previous modeling studies," Philip Cameron-Smith, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a news release.  

"The shift in emissions will change the heating patterns." 

To find out how the marine plankton and production of the gas will respond as concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rise, scientists plugged present day values (355 parts per million) and a future value (970 parts per million) into a global ocean biogeochemical model. 

In the future scenario, the team found that DMS emission to the atmosphere was 150 percent higher than current levels in the Southern Ocean. The plankton there benefit from melting sea ice and other ecosystem changes, which will open up cold water where they thrive.

The increased production of the plankton in the Southern Ocean, in particular a species called Phaeocystis, will compensate for a decline in production in warming waters that stunt growth, Cameron-Smith said.

Going forward, the researchers said that they may need to factor in how ocean acidification from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the oceans will affect the plankton community, and thus DMS production.

For a preview on this issue, check out the video below:

More on climate change and the oceans:

• Scientists figure out origins of sea smell 
• Plankton, base of ocean food chain, in big decline 
• Warming alters Antarctic food web, study finds 
• Arctic ice melt sparks plankton blooms 
• Scientists unravel recipe for ocean's biological blooms 

Findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. In addition to Cameron-Smith, co-authors include Scott Elliot and Matthew Maltrud of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; David Erickson of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Oliver Wingenter of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Memrise

A mnemonic device shows the transition between a picture depicting strength and the Mandarin character for strength. Such devices help us remember words, according to the founders of Memrise, a website that teaches you words of a foreign language.

For adults, learning a new language is often a long, frustrating process that inevitably ends up in failure. A memory expert and a neuroscientist hope to change that with a new online software package designed to make learning the vocabulary of a foreign language fast, fun and rewarding.

"Really good successful learning needs to be vivid, imaginative and creative. It needs to be active. And if you can make it a bit social, that's great," Greg Detre, a neuroscientist and co-founder of Memrise, the online destination to learn foreign words quickly, told me today.

The website is built on the metaphor that our minds are gardens where memories are either flourishing or wilting. When users learn a new word, they get a seed that they tend and grow into a healthy plant by correctly passing well-timed tests that force the users to recall the word.

To help users learn the word, the site offers up mnemonic devices. When learning the word man in Mandarin, for example, Memrise transforms the character for man into a cartoon of a man. Users are also encouraged to come up with their own devices. These devices, the founders say, make the words stick in your mind and enriches the recall experience. 

To help plant and tend the memory, the site uses an algorithm that tests you on the word when the memory of it is most likely fading your mind.

"It is trying to teach you how your memories work," Detre explained. "If you don't nurture them on a scientific schedule, they die just like flowers. But we are also at the same time trying to make your learning visible and social and useful."

The fun part hinges on choreography behind the scenes that props the tests at the time and a level of difficulty where you have to work a bit to get the answer, but that you will likely get it right. In other words, the tests make you feel like a genius, which feels good, so you keep on learning. If the tests were too hard or too easy, you might quit, Detre noted.

The site also lets you play along with friends and strangers. Comparing your garden with others fires up the competitive spirit, for example. Users can also share mnemonic devices and encourage each other to learn new words, fostering a sense of community.

Memrise bills itself as teacher of words in a foreign language. "That's only a small part of learning a language," Luis Von Alm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of another online learning website, Duolingo, told Technology Review.

Detre agrees that Memrise alone will not teach you a new language, but, in his opinion, is the "best way to learn the words of a new language." And learning vocabulary, he added, is "the right way for the brain to kick itself into learning a new language."

More on language and learning:

• A baby's babble leads to language
• English won't dominate as world language
• Robots invent their own spoken language
• What language do we use with E.T.?

Tip o' the Log to Technology Review's Kristina Bjoran

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

CPOM / UCL / ESA

CryoSat's detailed data have been used to generate this map of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic with data from January and February. Thanks to CryoSat's orbit, ice thickness close to the North Pole can be seen for the first time.

Scientists have long used satellite imagery to illustrate the shrinking extent of the Arctic sea ice. Now they've got satellite data that will provide regular updates on whether the ice is getting thinner as well.

The first ice thickness map from the European Space Agency's CryoSat spacecraft was released Tuesday at an air show in Paris. It was compiled with data collected in January and February.

The map shows, for example, the ice is thickest near the North Pole and off the coasts of Greenland and northeastern Canada. It thins as it stretches out towards Alaska and Russia.

Scientists expect the imagery to complement studies that show the Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking. This winter, for example, U.S. scientists reported the sea ice extent was among the smallest ever seen.

In recent years, scientists have consistently warned that the sea ice extent will shrink dramatically in the decades to come, primarily as a result of global climate change.

These warnings are based on models and observations of the sea ice extent — that is how much of the Arctic Ocean the ice covers. For a more robust understanding, scientists also need to know how thick the ice is.

The winds could, for example, push the ice out of one area but pile it up in another. This would mean the ice extent had diminished, but the volume remained the same.

CryoSat measures the thickness of the ice, providing a 3-D view, Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told me today.

"Looking at the extent, we are just looking down at the surface, sort of the facade of the ice cover and you don't know exactly what it looks like underneath," he said. CryoSat, he added, will provide regularly updated pictures on the volume of sea ice.

Scientists have previously obtained ice thickness measurements, but only a few times a year with instruments such as NASA's IceSat, Meier noted. The new satellite provides continuous data. "It can show us how the ice changes seasonally and from year to year," he said.

The satellite obtains thickness measurements with a technique that bounces radar waves off the ice and the water in cracks which separate the ice floes. A calculation allows them to determine the sea ice thickness above the water.

Of course, about 90 percent of sea ice is actually underwater, "but if you measure the 10 percent above and know roughly what the density (of the ice) is, which tells you how much is above versus below, then you can calculate the total thickness," Meier said.

CPOM / UCL / ESA / Planetary Visions

For the first time, data from ESA's CryoSat mission have been used to map the height of the ice sheet that blankets Antarctica. CryoSat's ability to map the edges of the ice sheet is demonstrated by the detail that can be seen of the flow from east Antarctica onto the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf in the west. The outer white circle represents the limits of earlier missions and the inner circle shows that CryoSat is collecting data up 88° latitude.

For now, the thickness data shows the ice thickness in January and February. But in coming months more maps will be released and, over time, that allow scientists to see year-to-year changes in ice thickness.

"The data are exceptionally detailed and considerably better than the mission specification," the ESA writes in a news release. "They even show lineations in the central Arctic that reflect the ice's response to wind stress."

Meier cautioned, however, that the data is "fresh off the presses," more a proof of concept that the satellite can see sea ice and measure its thickness. "There are still a lot of things to work out ... it is too early to put a lot of stock in the absolute numbers."

In addition, the researchers have created a new map of Antarctica showing the height of the ice extent there. The data here is also preliminary, but shows CryoSat's ability to map the edges of the ice sheet in detail.

Understanding how ice sheets are changing at edges of Antarctica and Greenland is key, since change is happening fastest at the edges.

More on the Arctic sea ice:

• Arctic sea ice ties for smallest area this winter 
• Arctic sea ice may be altering weather, expert says 
• Inuit dog sleds help measure Arctic sea ice 
• 2010 seeing hot temps, less Arctic sea ice 
• Dramatic Arctic sea ice shrinkage predicted