Engineers who specialize in building NASA spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robot probes to measure how rapidly climate change is melting vast ice sheets around Antarctica and what that means for rising sea levels.

Engineers who specialize in building NASA spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robot probes

Engineers who specialize in building NASA spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robot probes to measure how rapidly climate change is melting vast ice sheets around Antarctica and what that means for rising sea levels.

It was also a step toward the ultimate vision for their project, IceNode: a fleet of autonomous robots that would venture beneath Antarctic ice shelves to help scientists calculate how rapidly the frozen continent is losing ice — and how fast that melting could cause global sea levels to rise.

On a remote patch of the windy, frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California huddled together, peering down a narrow hole in a thick layer of sea ice.