WEBVTT

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My name's Dave Eastmont.

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I'm the mission manager for Wallops aircraft at this time. My previous experience

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has been with the P-3. I've done DC-8 flights I've done Aerosonde UAV flights.

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and C-130 flights. I've probably got upwards to about 4,000 hours in the back of the plane.

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My name's Bill Krabill. I'm the project scientist for Operation Ice Bridge. And I've been flying missions

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like this to Greenland since 1991.

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The aircraft behind me is NASA's P-3 research aircraft. It's used as a platform

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for various remote sensors. And we're going to be using it in Greenland this year, as we have most years since 1991

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to collect a suite of measurements to tell the scientists the thickness of the ice and how fast it's flowing

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out to the ocean. And what we're observing is the decade of the '90s was exhibiting very

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small changes. If we saw a half a meter to a meter

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per year of thinning, that was a pretty large number in that time

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frame. But since the turn of the century, we're seeing the same glaciers now thinning at 15, and 20, and 25 meters

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per year. So there's some very drastic changes taking place up in Greenland.

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The additional work that we'll be doing for Operation Ice Bridge will be to follow the exact

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orbit paths on the surface that ICESat has followed

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in the past and will follow in the future and that ICESat II would follow when it gets launched in 2015.

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It does a very nice job of global coverage particularly of Antarctica that's quite remote and very difficult to get to with

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an airplane. So whereas the typical flights that we would make in the past are focused, targeted towards the outlet

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glaciers, we'll now also do the same kinds of measurements

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that a satellite would, and this sort of ties the two projects together.

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I'm Jim Yungle, I'm a lead engineer on the NASA Airborne Topographic Mapper Project.

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It measures the elevation of the terrain the aircraft flies over

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by firing pulses of laser light from the aircraft to the ground and back. Those pulses are scanned in an oval scan

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and this allows us to map a swath of terrain underneath the aircraft, and it allows us to return in a future

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year and repeat those measurements pretty accurately.

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We're concerned with the icesheets of the world because to some degree they control sea level.

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Greenland is the second-largest ice sheet in the world. It contains enough

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ice and snow that if it were to melt it would raise sea levels

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substantially, maybe as much as 20 feet in this area. You can imagine Greenland

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as a huge ice cube that's a thousand miles long and 400 miles wide and two miles thick in the center.

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It buffers global climate, regional climate so that changes in the ice sheet become very important indicators of global climate change.

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It's something you have to experience...

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we'll fly these patterns at 1,500 feet,

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above the ground level. And you get up on the ice sheet it's like flying over the clouds.

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And you look down and it's white, fluffy sometimes -- it just looks like a cloud.

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You have to keep in your head that it's solid underneath you.

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Probably one of the neatest things to see is when you're flying

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down the glacier toward the ocean, you're at 1,500 feet and just as you hit the ocean

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the glacier drops off another thousand feet. No matter now often you do it, it always takes your breath.