 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 Newman also from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where we study glaciers, ice sheets, 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 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 to 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 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 and 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 is different for sure. At South Pole there was what 100 or 120 people there and that day where you all climb into 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 honestly at least for me Kelly I kind of got into the routine of the days you know. It was typically forest or myself up earliest and starting coffee and that sort of thing. Chad getting up and getting the tractors ready to go 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 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 and you're fishing through boxes looking for looking for whatever it is you're you're going to make for dinner that day. So honestly for me at least 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 put you know were particularly fond of snacking on. Chad and I what I found was really getting to know him with respect to his mechanical capabilities and I enjoyed conversations. I learned a lot about piston bullies in my first year which is great. So I I think 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 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 all these different field projects that come through including ours and including the food. And I remember we did some good serious thinking about what food we wanted to bring along and how we're going to plan this and that out and what would we do for lunches. And most importantly what we're going to 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 you're allowed to order as a team and we packed it up nice and neatly into a box and these are great like Cadbury chocolate bars are just fantastic and you get excited thinking about oh my gosh you know we're going to be eating really well on this tour of things in addition to the chocolate bars but also just the chocolate bars. So then we got everything to the South Pole. We unpacked the stuff that we had put together in McMurdo and we repacked it into our sleds and all the cargo boxes on the sleds and somewhere in there it was like when you packed that one box in 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 in the field or evenings in the field say hey somebody go find that chocolate box. We never found it until we were ripping everything apart at the end of the traverse and then we found our entire allotment of chocolate. Hey so Kelly you've done a number of outreach events during the during our our quarantine tech talking to people about remote sensing and what you do for NASA and University of Maryland and fieldwork in the Antarctic. How do you describe Antarctica for a group of folks who've never really been there haven't 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 you know obviously we've got these big track vehicles that we're 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 plane out there and maybe you know ice on one side and sky on the other and at first it 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 the 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. It seems flat and you're out there with just a handful of people and you're just kind of rolling through the the snow it's not perfectly flat there's these waves of ice called Sestrugi 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 also see the beauty in the in the weirdness of the starkness that that we see. Yeah I totally second that I've had a number of folks ask 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 you start watching out the window and it's like I never really got tired of 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 I don't know maybe 20 minutes and that was far enough so that camp went from big to tiny little thing on the horizon and you 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. It gives you a sense that maybe we're not out here alone but it's it's just your footprints from here somewhere but that's pretty cool too to be out there just kind of driving by GPS no roads but you still encounter tracks from previous seasons. Cool hey let's have a look at one of those videos from the previous trips 14 days two piston bullies 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 piston bullies tracked vehicles similar to the ones that groom your ski areas. Behind those piston bullies 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 while we were driving. Kitchen tent fuel generators all sorts of cargo. Everything we needed for the for the trip and first from a both science and survival standpoint. So this entire traverse was in support of ISET 2 which will launch later in the year. ISET 2 is 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 and collect a reference data set we'll be ready to compare and evaluate see how we're doing. 319 is uh 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 ISET 2 when we make an elevation measurement how are we sure it's in the right place. So in this picture here you can see a bamboo pole with a little white cap on the end of it and embedded in that cap little piece of glass about as 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 as as Kelly has demonstrated show up in data with altimeters like ISET 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 10,000 feet and yeah you notice it pretty quickly the temperature is a lot colder than than in McMurdo it's probably 30 degrees 40 degrees colder and 10,000 feet higher. Walking from the from the camp to where we're putting in an array for example would be 10 minute walk maybe five minutes a couple breaks on the way you know it's uh 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 ISET 2. ISET 2 has 1,387 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 with this stretch that that we drove and by repeating it every year about the same time a year we'll we'll have uh 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 piece of either of the ice sheets. 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 ISET 2 is actively collecting data on orbit uh we have another traverse coming up in the near future uh 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!