Tuesday was cold
I almost froze my toes
What's it gonna be next week who knows
That's climate
Oh, that's the climate you got
You take a bunch of weather
and you average it together
and you're doin' the climate rock
NASA Explorers
Cryosphere
Glacial Pace
Episode Four
“At a glacial pace” – it means something’s happening so slowly
you can barely tell it’s happening at all.
That used to describe the very incremental movement glaciers and ice sheets experienced each year.
But now, that’s changing.
We’re tagging along with three NASA scientists to understand the different lengths they go
to not only investigate glaciers and ice sheets,
but also communicate their often-complicated science, to the public.
First, let’s get oriented
Ice sheets, in pink, pretty much occur in only two places – Antarctica and Greenland.
Glaciers, in yellow, play a key role draining melt off the ice sheet
Glaciers are also found in the high mountains…but we’ll get to those in another episode.
So we know that something is happening in Greenland right now,
that is unprecedented in the last several thousand years.
That’s Dr. Josh Willis, oceanographer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Josh and his team are tackling one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st century
trying to answer fundamental questions about how melting glaciers impact sea level rise.
With my mission, Oceans Melting Greenland, or “OMG” for short,
we’re trying to understand just how much of Greenland’s melt is caused by the oceans.
Along with being one of NASA’s top scientists working on the cryosphere,
Josh is passionate about demystifying climate change in typically unconventional ways.
I think by reaching out to people with a little bit of humor, a little bit of fun,
maybe a song, you really have the opportunity to help people understand
and come to terms with what we’re doing to our planet.
Because it's definitely happening and it's definitely a big deal
and we need to start preparing for it
Down at the opposite pole, Dr. Kelly Brunt is getting ready for a major expedition.
In December and January this coming year,
I’ll actually be in Antarctica down near the south pole collecting ground-based GPS data.
This is actually Kelly’s second expedition to the south pole.
The first occurred in December and January of last year.
Both surveys are critical and will help validate data collected by
NASA’s airborne campaign, Operation IceBridge
and the recently launched satellite mission ICESat-2.
All three of these layers, that ground-based, that airborne and the satellite are all tied together.
The ground-based helps validate both the satellite and the airborne
helps give us more validation data for the satellites
but also a bigger story with respect to the depth
of the ice sheet and what’s going on underneath the surface.
While some scientists are taking measurements in the field,
others are looking for answers in physics and lines of code.
For me, these projections that we’re doing, they do have a very personal meaning.
Dr. Sophie Nowicki is an ice sheet modeler.
That means she and her team have the important job of forecasting how ice will change the future
which also predicts changes in sea level rise.
It’s a job she doesn’t take lightly, especially since urban planning and infrastructure
use her team’s models to make decisions about the future and safety of their communities.
When we make those projections that are one hundred years in the future,
a hundred years can seem so far away – like I don’t have to worry about it,
it’s just too far.
But actually, they’re not.
It’s really that the future we’re looking at that our children or grandchildren will see to experience.
Whether is learning to communicate in new ways,
traversing a swath of Antarctica in a massive piston bully
or taking responsibly for an impactful climate forecast,
our NASA scientists are pushing the limits of discovery every day.
But on a very human level, they’re people with families and friends who have a stake
in finding out why and how the planet is changing as rapidly as it is.
On the next episode of Cryosphere
Every place, at least so far, that we have found life
we've found water along with it
and so when we try to understand the thresholds for life
where life might exist, elsewhere in our solar system and the universe
water is one of those things that we look for
Episode Five: Icy Moons