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Tuesday was cold

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I almost froze my toes

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What's it gonna be next week who knows

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That's climate

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Oh, that's the climate you got

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You take a bunch of weather

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and you average it together

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and you're doin' the climate rock

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NASA Explorers

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Cryosphere

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Glacial Pace

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Episode Four

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“At a glacial pace” – it means something’s happening so slowly 

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you can barely tell it’s happening at all. 

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That used to describe the very incremental movement glaciers and ice sheets experienced each year.

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But now, that’s changing. 

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We’re tagging along with three NASA scientists to understand the different lengths they go 

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to not only investigate glaciers and ice sheets,

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but also communicate their often-complicated science, to the public. 

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First, let’s get oriented 

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Ice sheets, in pink, pretty much occur in only two places – Antarctica and Greenland. 

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Glaciers, in yellow, play a key role draining melt off the ice sheet

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Glaciers are also found in the high mountains…but we’ll get to those in another episode.

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So we know that something is happening in Greenland right now, 

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that is unprecedented in the last several thousand years.

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That’s Dr. Josh Willis, oceanographer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

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Josh and his team are tackling one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st century

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trying to answer fundamental questions about how melting glaciers impact sea level rise.

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With my mission, Oceans Melting Greenland, or “OMG” for short, 

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we’re trying to understand just how much of Greenland’s melt is caused by the oceans. 

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Along with being one of NASA’s top scientists working on the cryosphere, 

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Josh is passionate about demystifying climate change in typically unconventional ways.

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I think by reaching out to people with a little bit of humor, a little bit of fun,

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maybe a song, you really have the opportunity to help people understand 

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and come to terms with what we’re doing to our planet. 

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Because it's definitely happening and it's definitely a big deal

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and we need to start preparing for it

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Down at the opposite pole, Dr. Kelly Brunt is getting ready for a major expedition. 

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In December and January this coming year, 

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I’ll actually be in Antarctica down near the south pole collecting ground-based GPS data.

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This is actually Kelly’s second expedition to the south pole. 

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The first occurred in December and January of last year. 

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Both surveys are critical and will help validate data collected by 

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NASA’s airborne campaign, Operation IceBridge 

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and the recently launched satellite mission ICESat-2.

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All three of these layers, that ground-based, that airborne and the satellite are all tied together.

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The ground-based helps validate both the satellite and the airborne 

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helps give us more validation data for the satellites 

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but also a bigger story with respect to the depth 

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of the ice sheet and what’s going on underneath the surface.

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While some scientists are taking measurements in the field, 

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others are looking for answers in physics and lines of code. 

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For me, these projections that we’re doing, they do have a very personal meaning.

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Dr. Sophie Nowicki is an ice sheet modeler. 

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That means she and her team have the important job of forecasting how ice will change the future

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which also predicts changes in sea level rise. 

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It’s a job she doesn’t take lightly, especially since urban planning and infrastructure  

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use her team’s models to make decisions about the future and safety of their communities. 

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When we make those projections that are one hundred years in the future,

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a hundred years can seem so far away – like I don’t have to worry about it,

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it’s just too far. 

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But actually, they’re not. 

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It’s really that the future we’re looking at that our children or grandchildren will see to experience. 

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Whether is learning to communicate in new ways,

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traversing a swath of Antarctica in a massive piston bully 

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or taking responsibly for an impactful climate forecast, 

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our NASA scientists are pushing the limits of discovery every day. 

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But on a very human level, they’re people with families and friends who have a stake

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in finding out why and how the planet is changing as rapidly as it is.

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On the next episode of Cryosphere

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Every place, at least so far, that we have found life

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we've found water along with it

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and so when we try to understand the thresholds for life

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where life might exist, elsewhere in our solar system and the universe

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water is one of those things that we look for

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Episode Five: Icy Moons

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