#EarthDayAtHome: Science in Ice-olation with Kelly Brunt and Tom Neumann

Hi, welcome to NASA’s Earth Day at Home. I’m Kelly Brunt. I’m a glaciologist with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and with the University of Maryland. Hi and happy Earth Day everybody. I’m Tom Neumann, also from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center where we study glaciers, ice sheet, sea ice and the frozen places of our planet. So while everybody’s out there social distancing, we thought we’d take everybody on a virtual field trip of one of our expeditions. We recently went to Antarctica in support of NASA’s ICESat-2. So we thought we’d share with you a little bit of conversation and some videos, and if you guys have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section of this video.

So ICESat-2 is the mission that 00:45 - Kelly and I work on, and ICESat-2 is all about measuring the height of the Earth. As the name suggests, it’s really designed to measure changes in glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice, and so Kelly and I were down in Antarctica to collect ground-based data that we could compare with our space-based measurements to see how well ICESat-2 can measure surface height. So our expedition took us to the center of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Ultimately to do that we flew down to New Zealand and then to the edge of the Antarctic continent - a station called McMurdo Station, and from there we flew into the South Pole. Ultimately both those stations are run and operated by the National Science Foundation.

For this 01:26 - expedition, we spent time at South Pole Station. Specifically we were there over Christmas, and you might think that’s a tough place to spend Christmas, but actually the social world of South Pole Station is fantastic, and they make the absolute best out of the holidays. So, Tom, when we’re out there there’s only four of us for two solid weeks of driving, doing the same thing every day. How is it to work with the same people in the same environment for that length of time? You know it’s a–it is different for sure. At South Pole there was what, a hundred or a hundred and twenty people there, and that day where you all climb into your your tractors or your tracked vehicles and drive away and you see South Pole receding in the distance, it’s like okay I guess we’re doing this now.

But 02:12 - honestly at least for me, Kelly, I kind of got into the routine of the days. You know, it was typically Forrest or myself up earliest and starting coffee and that sort of thing. Chad getting up and getting the tractors ready to go and and you joining us not long after, and just the routine of like packing up the kitchen, putting away all the breakfast supplies, making sure you’ve got enough snacks for the day with you and and that sort of thing. And then the reverse at the end of the day that you stop and it’s like that clock starts ticking. Who’s on dinner duty today? And you’re fishing through boxes, looking for looking for whatever it is you’re you’re gonna make for dinner that day.

So 02:54 - honestly, for me at least, that the 14 days went by pretty quickly. I think when you’re traveling for two weeks kind of with the same group of people you get to know people really, really well. I think by the end of about the third day, we all know how each other took our coffee or what they were particularly fond of snacking on. For Chad and I, what I found was really getting to know know him with respect to his mechanical capabilities, and I enjoyed conversations. I learned a lot about Pistenbullies in my first year, which is great.

So I think 03:25 - it was just you know tapping into that thing that people know the most about and kind of getting to getting to know them through that aspect. It was fun. You know, one of the things I remember, Kelly, was that you and I did most of the of the “food shopping,” if you will. Back at McMurdo, of course, is where they have all the supplies for all these different field projects that come through, including ours, including the food. And I remember we did some good serious thinking about what food we wanted to bring along and how we’re gonna plan this and that out and what would we do for lunches, and most importantly what we’re gonna do for chocolate. I don’t remember eating any chocolate. I remember packing a lot of chocolate, but what happened there? So we, we ordered the maximum amount of chocolate that you’re allowed to order as a team, and we packed it up nice and neatly into a box.

And these are great 04:15 - like Cadbury chocolate bars are just fantastic and you get excited thinking about, oh my gosh, you know, we’re gonna be eating really well on this trip. Things in addition to the chocolate bars, but also just the chocolate bars. So then we got everything to the South Pole, we unpack the stuff that we had put together McMurdo, and we repack it into our sleds and all the cargo boxes on the sleds. And somewhere in there, it was like when you pack that one box and kind of that extra little panel space in the back of your station wagon, you forget about it. And we don’t know where we put the chocolate, and we we spent days and a few evenings in the field, “Hey, somebody go find that chocolate box!” We never found until we were ripping everything apart at the end of the Traverse and then we found our entire allotment of chocolate.

Hey, 05:03 - so, Kelly, you’ve done a number of outreach events during our quarantine talking to people about remote sensing and what you do for NASA and University of Maryland and field working in the Antarctic. How do you describe Antarctica for a group of folks who’ve never really been there and I’ve thought about it much? I think, you know, when you show people photos from the Antarctic–the first thing the kids want to see are pictures of animals and the weird vehicles. And we have the weird vehicles that, you know, obviously we’ve got these big tracked vehicles that were hauling around on the ice sheet, and those are pretty cool, and it’s not something you drive every day. So that’s really unique, and people really like that. As far as animals, we’re in the center of the ice sheet, so most of the animals in the wildlife are around the edge, but then you show them these sort of really stark photos of the horizon, just kind of like the white plain out there, and maybe, you know, ice on one side and sky on the other.

And at first it 05:55 - seems like, oh my god, it’s just a line in a photo, you know, defining the Earth versus– the land versus the sky. And then you realize there’s this amazing beauty to that. This sort of stark beauty that you don’t really get to experience very often. Places where, you know, anytime there’s clouds or something dynamic in the sky that’s providing this sort of interesting view that you’re seeing, the interesting landscape that you’re seeing, for lack of a better word. So I basically describe, yeah, you have this darkness, but there is a real beauty to that, and it’s extremely unique.

06:30 - It seems flat and you’re out there with just a handful of people and you’re just kind of rolling through the snow. It’s not perfectly flat; there’s these waves of ice called sastrugi. The wind kind of shapes the snow and creates these little waves. This is not unlike a long boat expedition where you’ve just got a flat horizon and you’re rolling around on the dunes of ice for weeks. So it’s really very similar to that. So you know, you kind of describe it that way, and people get a little bit more comfortable with it, and and also see the beauty in the in the weirdness, the starkness that we see. Yeah oh I totally second that.

I’ve had a number of folks ask, 07:10 - “Don’t you get bored out there just looking at the same thing day after day?” And I’m like no, it’s it’s not the same thing. You start watching out the window, and it’s like I never really got tired of watching just the surface change from day to day and from place to place.I think only one time on this trip I went for a walk back along our tracks. I remember it was one evening after dinner. I think you were up reading or, you know, cleaning up the kitchen or whatever it was, and and I was I walked back out for maybe 20 minutes, and that was far enough So that camp went from big to tiny little thing on the horizon.

And you 07:45 - kind of have a seat and look around, and that was totally cool. After doing three of these, you know, there’s nothing out there, and you’re just driving along the sort of the ice sheet, and you don’t really expect to see anything. Every once in a while on the, you know, the second and third Traverse, we would see the tracks from the earlier traverses, and that’s pretty cool. Tt gives you a sense that maybe, ooh, we’re not out here alone, but it’s it’s just your footprints from years before. But that’s pretty cool, too, to be out there, it’s just kind of driving by GPS–no road–but you still encounter tracks from previous seasons.

Cool! Hey, let’s 08:18 - have a look at one of those videos from the previous trips, eh? [Music] 14 days, two PistenBullies, four people, so yeah, 750 kilometers, you know, door-to-door. Recently we just got back from Antarctica where we completed about a two-week ground traverse near the South Pole. We’re basically driving PistenBullies, tracked vehicles similar the ones that groom your ski areas. Behind those PistenBullies were 60-foot long plastic sled trains.And ultimately those trains carry things like our sleeping tents, fully erected and left standing during the day when we were driving.

Kitchen tent, 09:09 - fuel generators, all sorts of cargo. Everything we needed for the trip. And from a both science and survival standpoint. So this entire Traverse was in support of ICESat-2, which will launch later in the year. ICESat-2’s all about measuring elevation, and a natural question is, how do you know you’re getting the right answer? This is how we will know.

We’ll go out 09:31 - and collect a reference dataset, we’ll be ready to compare and evaluate see how we’re doing. So the big measurement we were making was to measure the elevation of the ice sheet surface around our Traverse. And we had the two GPS running, one on each vehicle, measuring that elevation. One of the other experiments we were doing is leaving out what we call corner cube reflectors to get an assessment of the pointing of ICESat-2. When we make an elevation measurement, how are we sure it’s in the right place? So in this picture, you can see a bamboo pole with a little white cap on the end of it, and embedded in that cap is a little piece of glass about is about as big as your your pinky nail and calibrated to return green laser light from the satellite, bounces off of this thing and goes right back up to the satellite again. Super reflective.

So these things, 10:20 - as as Kelly has demonstrated, show up in data with altimeters like ICESat-2. When you first get to South Pole and you’re coming from McMurdo which is a nice seaside town right at sea level, and South Pole is, what, about about ten thousand feet. And, yeah, you notice it pretty quickly. The temperature is a lot colder than in McMurdo, it’s probably 30 degrees, 40 degrees colder and ten thousand feet higher. Walking from the camp to where we’re putting in an array, for example, would be a ten minute walk, maybe five minutes. A couple breaks on the way, you know. It’s still pretty high. The plan is to repeat this Traverse for the next three years, so four years of data total, and that would last the mission lifetime–the mission requirement lifetime for ICESat-2.

ICESat-2 has 1,387 11:11 - orbits, and so it’s cruising around the world, and it’s got these unique tracks that repeat every 91 days. And all those tracks converge right here at 88-South, and so our route crossed, what, 20% of them. So we can calibrate data from 20% of our tracks with this stretch that that we drove, and by repeating it every year about the same time of year, we’ll have it overlap at exactly the same time, but we’ll also be able to figure out what’s been going on in between. Because we’ll measure it in 2017 and then again in 2018, and you can see how it changes from year to year. So that’ll be pretty cool, too. It’ll quickly become the best surveyed piece of either of the ice sheets.

11:53 - Hey everybody, we hope you’ve enjoyed our virtual trip down to Antarctica where we were socially distancing while traversing. Keep those questions coming in the comment section, and we’ll do our best to answer them. So ICESat-2 is actively collecting data on orbit. We have another Traverse coming up in the near future. In the meantime, you can keep up with all things going on in cryospheric sciences at NASA by following us on either Twitter or Facebook. Happy Earth Day, everybody! .