Here at the end of the Earth
it still feels like a place for raw exploration and adventure.
It’s vast in all directions and ground zero for some of the
biggest questions we have about the climate.
But when we decided to make a series about the frozen places on Earth,
we knew there would be one hurdle we’d need to jump over first:
What is the cryosphere?
The what?
Ummm
Oooh
I don't know - I have no idea
While I'm aware of the cryosphere, I don't actually know what it is
It has something to do with ice
Alright, that's all I got
How do you get people acquainted with the cryosphere
when most of us don’t know what it is?
NASA Explorers
Introducing Season One
CRYOSPHERE
The Big Thaw
Episode One
Washington, D.C.
Hey, so here we are in Washington, D.C standing on the roof of NASA Headquarters.
That’s the capitol building right behind me and what Headquarters does
is kinda serve as the focal point to connect the dots.
That’s Dr. Tom Wagner- NASA’s Cryospheric Program Scientist at Headquarters.
In short – Tom is responsible for making sure NASA knows what the current status of the cryosphere is.
The cryosphere is everything from the snow that falls by your house
to the icy reaches of the Himalayas to the big, big, big ice sheets of Antarctica
all the way at the south pole and also the frozen ground of the Arctic,
and even some of that frozen ground that’s currently under the ocean.
If you had to break it down, you’d have a mix of
Sea ice
Snow cover
Permafrost
Ice sheets
and Glaciers
Right now, our best predictions are that sea levels
will rise anywhere from one to three feet in the next hundred years.
Three feet of sea level rise has the potential to displace about a hundred million people,
which is a lot of people that need to find new homes.
Our current reality places us at a near tipping point.
And the cryosphere is playing a huge part in that delicate balance.
So, one of the things people don’t know about NASA is that we study the Earth
and we’ve been doing that since NASA’s inception back in the 1950s.
And we study the frozen part of the Earth in a variety of ways.
Missions like SnowEx,
Airborne Snow Observatory
Oceans Meting Greenland
Operation IceBridge
Arctic – Boreal Vulnerability Experiment
and countless other labs and individual researchers
stand at the forefront of monitoring the cryosphere.
But this year was a particularly big year.
3...2...1...and liftoff
of GRACE Follow On continuing the legacy of the GRACE mission
of tracking the movement of water across our planet.
Two state-of-the-art satellite missions are being launched in a single year
as part of a major attempt to understand Earth’s frozen places.
Our scientists are answering hard questions
sharing stories from the field,
and giving their best predictions for what we can expect of a warming world.
We’re taking you with us as we follow NASA explorers
on their journey to the frozen ends of the Earth
as they study our rapidly changing world from satellites, planes and boots on the ground.
CRYOSPHERE
On the next episode of CRYOSPHERE
What we can do really well from orbit is
we can tell when a surface of land is covered in snow
What's tricky is though, how thick is that snow
and it's even trickier how much water is in that snow
Episode Two: Snow