Meltdown: On the Front Lines of Climate Change

After watching over Earth’s poles for decades, NASA aviators see new warnings of the chaos to come.

By Eric Betz
May 19, 2017 12:00 AMNov 21, 2019 7:41 PM
DC-8 over Antarctica - Harbeck
A NASA research plane, the DC-8, flies over the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip. The aircraft is retrofitted to take measurements of land and sea ice. (Credit: Jeremy Harbeck)

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“Terrain! Terrain! Pull up!”

The programmed alarm rings throughout the plane’s cockpit, announcing a fast-approaching rocky outcrop. Pilot David Fedors casually reaches out a hand and overrides the warning. Twisting the altitude knob to the left, he aims the plane down toward an endless expanse of white, gleaming in the midday sun. He levels it off at a cruising altitude of 1,500 feet.

NASA’s Airborne Laboratory is flying low over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Inside, a team of scientists is taking the temperature of a continent blanketed in 5 million square miles of ice, equivalent to about 60 percent of the planet’s freshwater.

Their instruments are zeroed in on the Amundsen Sea Embayment, a vast region rich in volcanoes, ice shelves and glaciers, some as big as Washington state. Here and across Antarctica, eons of storms have piled snow, inch by inch, layer by layer, until the ice was miles high. Glaciers deliver that ice from the inner reaches of the continent to the ocean, where massive frozen shelves float atop the water.

NASA’s crew members navigate the dicey weather and terrain at Earth’s poles. (Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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