27 July 2017By Avi Steinber
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?
...Imagine (click here) 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 gathered up in just the top layers of the ice sheet.
Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71m sq km (656,000 sq miles), three times the size of Texas. At its belly – from the top layer, yesterday’s snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000-130,000 years ago – it reaches 3,200 metres (10,500ft) thick, nearly four times taller than the world’s highest skyscraper....
...When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips barely peek out from under the ice – and these are just the visible ones – it’s possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this quantity of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.
The crew of Nasa’s Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. 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 disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change....
...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 almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same time, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.
On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding plane, 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 see what they were seeing, to see the facts....
...But at pre-flight weather meetings, polar ice is mostly of concern to him for the quirky way it might affect that day’s weather.....
...What’s needed is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change....
The caliper of intelligence and experience for this level of science cannot be understated. John Sonntag is at least as valuable as all his instrumentation.
Scientists like Sonntag make the leap from machine data to human understanding in the depth of the meaning of climate and weather to the human experience. Sorry, but, no instrumentation will provide that insight.
Who would want to take the chance of a machine misinterpreting what data means to the human experience?
...Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Sonntag is there at every phase, including at the construction and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission....
...Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy....
The Greenland Icesheet is a real hazard to the countries that line the Atlantic Ocean. The meander of the icesheet is measured to be sure there is not a significant increase to indicate the icesheet could or is becoming unstable.
...The IceBridge data has also 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 view of the layers of ice that have grown above it.....
The ice that could potentially fall into or slide into the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland is not a minor issue. It could ultimately cause tsunamis that would wipe out Washington, DC among the coastal areas of every continent, except, Asia and Australia.
"Fairfax Climate Watch" (click here)
Above is a graph from "Fairfax (Virginia) Climate Watch" clearly illustrating the loss of land, but, also displaced populations due to expected sea level rise caused by anthropogentic climate change. The study was conducted in 2013.
No one would expect Virginia to face the same flood problems as New Orleans, but, it is true. The climate crisis effects the lives of many Virginians.
...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 almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same time, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.
On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding plane, 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 see what they were seeing, to see the facts....
...But at pre-flight weather meetings, polar ice is mostly of concern to him for the quirky way it might affect that day’s weather.....
...What’s needed is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change....The caliper of intelligence and experience for this level of science cannot be understated. John Sonntag is at least as valuable as all his instrumentation.
Scientists like Sonntag make the leap from machine data to human understanding in the depth of the meaning of climate and weather to the human experience. Sorry, but, no instrumentation will provide that insight.
Who would want to take the chance of a machine misinterpreting what data means to the human experience?
...Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Sonntag is there at every phase, including at the construction and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission....
...Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy....
The Greenland Icesheet is a real hazard to the countries that line the Atlantic Ocean. The meander of the icesheet is measured to be sure there is not a significant increase to indicate the icesheet could or is becoming unstable.
...The IceBridge data has also 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 view of the layers of ice that have grown above it.....
The ice that could potentially fall into or slide into the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland is not a minor issue. It could ultimately cause tsunamis that would wipe out Washington, DC among the coastal areas of every continent, except, Asia and Australia.
"Fairfax Climate Watch" (click here)Above is a graph from "Fairfax (Virginia) Climate Watch" clearly illustrating the loss of land, but, also displaced populations due to expected sea level rise caused by anthropogentic climate change. The study was conducted in 2013.
No one would expect Virginia to face the same flood problems as New Orleans, but, it is true. The climate crisis effects the lives of many Virginians.
