Video Transcript
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Lynette Boisvert, and I am a sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Between 2018 and 2019, I was a deputy project scientist for one of NASA's largest and longest running airborne campaigns called Operation Icebridge. The goal of Operation Icebridge was to provide measurements of both the Arctic and the Antarctic. The sea ice and the land ice.
During the years of 2009 to 2019, when there was a data gap between two of NASA's satellites ICESat and ICESat-2. This was an airborne campaign. So every year for about eight weeks, we'd head up to the Arctic in the springtime and fly over the sea ice there and the Greenland ice sheet. And then every fall we would head down to the southern hemisphere during their spring time, and we would fly over the Antarctic sea ice and the Antarctic ice sheet.
We would fly on many different NASA airplanes that were fitted with multiple instruments on board. And these consisted of lasers and radars, which measured the thickness of the snow and ice in the polar regions. It's really important that we flew over the same locations every year to monitor the changes in the ice there, because in the polar regions, this is where we're seeing the most pronounced climate change and the melting ice sheets can lead to sea level rise, which affects everyone on earth.
And the melting sea ice affects local and global weather patterns and ocean currents on the Earth. It's important to note that, you know, what happens in the polar regions doesn't necessarily stay in the polar regions. And changes there have big impacts globally. So it's really important that we are monitoring them as NASA. Part of my role as the deputy project scientist for Icebridge, I got to go into the field on some of these campaigns in order to help run the campaign.
During these campaigns, we would fly as much as the weather allowed us to. The weather was tricky in the polar regions, so whenever there were clear skies, we would fly. And one of my favorite locations that we're based out of, that I'm going to talk to you about today is truly Greenland. It's one of my actually one of my favorite locations on Earth.
Truly, Greenland is the US's northernmost Air Force Base. It's called Thule Air Force Base, actually, and it's located at 77 degrees north latitude, roughly 750 miles above the Arctic Circle and about 950 miles south of the North Pole. This Air Force base has about 600 inhabitants there, and it was established in the 1950s after World War II, during the Cold War.
It is still functioning Air Force base today, but its main role has changed. And the reason why we base out of here is because they have a really long runway for our planes and it's very close to the sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, which we measure. So the base is kind of small, right? There's only 600 people that live there.
There's an airport, of course there is a hotel, There's dormitory styled housings there. There's a restaurant, a cafeteria, a small grocery store, a fire department, multiple hangars. There's a gym with a bowling alley, a post office, and a community center. And it's located a little off the coast of North Star Bay. And about a mile inland from Thule is where the Greenland ice sheet begins.
And it's literally like a wall of ice towering out of the landscape. So when you fly into Thule, or at least when I flew into Tully in the springtime in April, you notice that everything is just white as far as you can see. You know, the water surrounding Greenland or surrounding Thule. In fact, is frozen over at this time of year.
It's covered in snow. So it's white. There's snow on the ground. So that's white. Everything is just very white. So it's something different when you when you leave, you know, from wherever you live in the mid-latitudes and you know, your world is filled with lots of color once, once you land in Thule and you get off the plane, you normally fly in the middle of the night to get there.
So you're tired, excited and also cold. You're leaving your house in the springtime and it's probably, you know, comfortable out like in the sixties and degrees. But then when you get to Thule, it's around zero degrees Fahrenheit. It's cold and it's a dry cold. So after you get settled, get off the plane and get settled into your room at the North Star in It's kind of like a dorm room, if you can imagine that.
So you have like a small twin bed, a desk, a chair, a lamp. You have a closet and a window with blackout curtains and you share bathrooms down the hallway. And then also on the second floor, there's like a kitchen and a little living room so you can cook and watch TV, although there's not much to watch on TV at all because they don't really get any channels.
They have like a movie channel and they play like the Thule Air Force Base News. And that's about it. Also there, there's in every building on base, there's these big loudspeakers on every hallway, and you're wondering what they're there for in the main reason is because the weather changes really rapidly and fast until the Greenland storms will roll in with a lot of snow and high winds, and soon they'll be like blackout or I should say whiteout conditions and not blackout conditions.
They they come on the loudspeakers and they tell you, you know, like shelter in place because it could get really dangerous. And life threatening. Conditions are in effect until further notice. All areas during the fire conditions are in effect until further notice. All roads are closed, all mission essential personnel remain at your duty station.
One of the first things I did when I was in Thule before work started was I walked down to the the coast or what is it is a coast, but it's hard to tell. It is the coast at this time of year because the water's frozen over. You know, I put on my coat and my boots and my hat and my gloves and, you know, lots of layers because it is cold. Walk through the snow down to the coast because I wanted to go on sea ice for the first time since that is what I study is really cool to be able to walk out on to it. You know, you're like walking on water essentially, but it's frozen water. And I just remember laying down on the ice and snow and making a snow angel and being so excited.
And then bending over and actually licking the bare ice because sea ice is actually since it's frozen ocean water, it's actually quite salty. So it's kind of different than what you'd expect for licking ice. You know, there's there is some wildlife in Thule, as much as you would think there wouldn't be, there's lots of Arctic foxes that they call arches that can be either white or like a grayish brown color that are, you know, fluffy like your foxes back home.
And also really fluffy white Arctic hares. They have huge, you know, cottontails, but small ears, and they're just around everywhere. There's also musk ox there, which are easier to spot in the winter because they're kind of like a large cow that's covered in like really dreadlock type yarn carpets. And they're huge. They have horns and they also survive in the winter there because of their heavy, heavy coats. Another thing about that I find so weird about the polar regions is that it is eerily quiet. Besides, like the planes taking off, just there's no ambient background noise like around here. You hear cars, you know, you hear birds chirping, you hear bugs, all these things. You don't really get that in when you're in Thule, Greenland, it's just quiet and it's like kind of serene because, you know, I guess we're all so used to hearing sounds all the time around us, but out there it's just cold and quiet and crisp. It's hard to explain the food there since you're on an Air Force base is just like your typical American fare. You know, they have burgers, pizza, sandwiches, salads, nothing too exciting, but one of the things that you would know when you were there is to eat the salads on Fridays and over the weekends, because that's when the vegetables came in on their weekly rotator plane.
So you didn't want to wait on wait until later on in the week because they normally would run out of vegetables. The other thing about Thule this time of year is that the Sun doesn't really set it kind of does a little bit. You get this thing called Civil Twilight for a few hours, but most of the time it's 16 hours of sunlight.
And that's really weird if you, you know, go outside or look outside at like 11 p.m. at night when, you know, you normally expect it to be pitch black and you know, you want to go to bed. But here it's kind of like a sunset dusk color and it actually really messes with your or it messes with my circadian rhythm.
I had a hard time sleeping there because it was always seemed like daytime, you know, and your body doesn't know how to--mine didn't know how to adjust to that.
During the campaigns, we get up early every morning and go to the weather station to look at the weather data and decide where we could fly. And then if we could, we would, you know, board the plane, which was at this time was the NASA P3. And this is a 16-foot-long four engine turboprop plane that originally was used by the Navy to hunt submarines back in the day.
But for now, we were hunting ice with this plane. So we take off every morning. You know, you hear the roar and the river, the engines, and then you'd feel the plane accelerating forward and take off into the air. And we'd be in the plane for around 8 hours a day. The plane was really loud. Not a lot of insulation in this plane compared to commercial aircraft.
Those tend to be quieter and also could sometimes get really cold. So you'd have to make sure you had a coat and even sometimes a blanket on board. One of the best things ever is we fly so low to the surface, we fly at 1500 feet compared to a commercial plane where you're up at, you know, 30,000 feet above the surface.
So we are actually really close to the surface and we're able to, you know, see the ice up or up close. And it's just so beautiful. I could spend, you know, hours just staring out the window, looking at the sea ice. And then when we would fly over parts of Greenland, like in the glacier valleys, we would, you know, be flying in these glacier valleys in this plane.
And it looks like sometimes you couldn't fit on some of these turns like your wings were too long, like the mountains were so close together on either side of you. And those times would often get kind of turbulent and bumpy. So if you, you know, got motion sickness, it probably wasn't the best flights for you to be on. You might lose your lunch and then arriving back home after being in the Arctic in the wintertime for so long or the late spring, you notice that like when you fly home and you get there, it's like everything is green, right? It's may now and all the trees have bloomed or the flowers bloom. Do you hear all the bugs and the birds?
And it's just so noisy and colorful because you used to sing white all the time, right? Okay. So then I've also I've also been to Thule in September, and that's a totally different experience than in April. So in September, when you fly and Italy and eventually everything is now brown, there's no more snow on the ground.
There's just brown rocks. The brown gravel road, the hillsides are brown. Not not really. Anything grows out as no trees or anything, just brown. And the the bay is now liquid water. You know, the ice melted over the summer and you can go down to the to the to the bay and there's little pieces of icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet that have floated up on shore.
If you take those back and you put them in a drink or a water glass of water, you know, back in your room or at the hotel you're staying at and truly there's all these little air bubbles that are trapped in this ice because it's from the Greenland ice sheet. So it's been it's snow that's been compressed over time and turns into ice.
And so they have all these really, really old air bubbles trapped in the ice. And if you put the ice in your cup of water, sort smell and you put your ear up close to it and you can hear like little popping sounds of it, it's really cool. Again, it's still quiet, but you do hear some sound sometimes and truly in September.
So there's a glacier just over the one of the hills that surrounds Thule. Oftentimes you'll hear a large crack and then a loud boom, kind of like almost like thunder. And you're like, what is that? And it's actually pieces of this glacier that are calving off into the water and they're so large and it just, you know, cuts through the the air like kind of like thunder almost.
So it's something different that you don't hear in the winter and in the springtime, I guess why I like Thule so much and being in the field, it's kind of like a different way of life. It's simpler and the word I like to describe is like, it's like solitude, right? You know, there's not a lot of people, you know, your cell phone doesn't work, so you're not getting distracted by notifications or, you know, there's like no social media.
You don't hear a lot of sounds. It's quiet. And, you know, you're surrounded by ice, snow or rocks, depending on the time of year there. And it's just really nice. So it's like solitude. But also since you're there in the field with a team and you're with them for so long and you're spending hours, you know, on the plane together every day and living with them, in a sense, it's kind of like family.
So I would describe my field experience as solitude, but also family, if that makes sense. But yeah, I really miss being in the field and I also can't wait to go back. When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by weather, specifically winter weather, and that was because, number one, we're so I grew up in the suburbs of D.C. and whenever it snowed even like an inch, they would cancel school.
So that was always fun because then you got to play in the snow. But number two, I disliked when we had big snowstorms here, like the world would kind of stop. And so I knew then I always wanted to study weather. So I was like, ooh, snow and, you know, frozen precipitation. And then in college we had a guest lecturer and one of my undergraduate courses and she was talking about the Arctic.
And this was right around the time of the first Arctic sea ice minimum in 2007. And I was like, Ooh, what is this? And then I started learning about sea ice and I was hooked. And ever since then I was like, I'm going to study this one day. Yeah. So now I'm kind of interested in looking at Arctic weather and storms and how they affect the sea ice.