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topsolarpanels · 7 years

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Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to assure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is collected up in just the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, virtually four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid river, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In theory, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would inundate the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight plans prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that ended its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS engineers, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I saw there were specialists who have, over the course of virtually 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same period, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to watch what they were ensure, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me revealed even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is mostly of fear to him for the quirky route it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight period. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the climate and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight period, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats needed is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he told, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had constructed the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his readings in order to better navigate his expeditions changing conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What makes this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I candidly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What makes it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, nearly sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in co-operation with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific tools, and he is the person in the fields responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for inducing assured that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising waters, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of approximately 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen repository of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First constructed during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us ensure the patterns in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulses through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has furthermore helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to invent a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish hilarity( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant valley system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flowing behind them, have lessened and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers locate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an era when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what constructs this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has constructed it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland devotes the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear missiles. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A flame, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapons hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed rapidly through passport control, but our bags were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our purses still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the purses hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my confusion, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, “the mens” told me, was actually only one guy, who had a tendency to mysteriously disappear.

By the route, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting each other with astound and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photograph: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my bag, I constructed my route down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was bide. But before I fulfilled the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low hum, like a shamans chant, was accompanied by the pleasant fragrance of gently baking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily ritual of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and reek it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, garmented in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is seeing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard violates in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sit there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, candidly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed perimeter wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was on the way to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant actually talk about that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The feeling in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launching, was of shifting workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least pay particular attention to gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you consider people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, seeing engineers asleep at their stations entail international instruments below their feet were happily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were expended flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the look of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye instantly grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively bursting ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that seen by novelists in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old stories terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar defines spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Consider that whiteness, which so scared Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snowfall and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep grounds climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps constructs life on earth more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling anxiety in 19 th-century readers, actually induce the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of kudo for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is closely connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I saw the same strong hand that deeply etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of changing ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have spent the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice dedicated shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is only our ignorance that stimulates us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. At the same hour that were getting better at meeting this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to just rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

In another conversation, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would greet a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, perfectly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing here. I suppose sitting on this plane, watching the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it told over and over again: just stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing answer. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfortable chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea levels. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record position expressed wasnt simply one of sober agreement with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, seeming down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I mean, if Nixon

The researcher giggled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the working day headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the march?

But the earnest question was merely met with stillnes and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the scheme was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed alleviated that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, brews in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the previous day. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing respond: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the song Angie over and over again, creating a agreeably mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of murderer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had find a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew expended his off-days on outings with a camera-equipped droning, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in insuring these people who had expended the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video showed some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft missiles. Today its merely an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the previous day. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and told: Well anyway, perhaps thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which prompted one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched into a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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