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the-velociruby · 6 years ago

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Earnest Discussions with Velo C. Raptor, #1

My Experiences with Bumbleby

I wanna try expressing my opinions & opening up a little bit here, if no one minds. This’ll be a first in a bunch of personal discourses, if anyone wants to see these kinds of posts from me. So as I am making my presence known on this site (probably a bad idea), I’ve been representing myself as a Bumbleby shipper. I wouldn’t say I’m the most devout shipper out there, nor do I really want to be viewed in that way, but when there’s a pairing that I really enjoy I’ll latch onto it tight. And Bumbleby happens to be one of them. Why do I enjoy it so much you may ask? Well, let’s dive right into that.

When I was first getting into anime, with Fullmetal Alchemist & Attack on Titan being my firsts, I was really getting into it. But my interests in most of the shows I watched died out as I finished them, and I felt a little empty without a show to be obsessed with. I was also an avid fan of Red Vs Blue at the time, so when they first announced RWBY as I was getting into anime, I was really interested. After watching the trailers, I was hooked. After watching the very first episode, I was in love with it. Granted, I didn’t like Volume 2 all that much (despite the bees’ dance), so my interests in it did die a little; that was quickly remedied by Volume 3, and then I was officially obsessed.

So while watching RWBY in its early years, I came to a few conclusions that others may have had at first: that Cinder Fall was the biggest bad, Adam Taurus was supposed to be some sort of mysterious badass (cue vomit in mouth), and everyone was gonna have a happy ending of some kind. Oh, and there was also something really important I concluded at the time: I thought everybody was straight. To me, it looked like almost everyone had a love interest of the opposite gender, such as Jaune & Pyrrha, Ren & Nora, Weiss & Neptune… and Sun & Blake. I didn’t really look hard enough into the show to think otherwise; I just assumed that Sun and Blake were gonna hook up while Yang was just gonna have her adventures happily by herself or with Ruby. It didn’t really bother me when I thought Rooster Teeth was gonna go for an all straight romance; I was pretty much fine with it because I would support the show I enjoy no matter what. Although admittedly, I did find that somewhat boring.

So if I thought RWBY was gonna go a heteronormative route, what got me into Bumbleby? Back to me first getting into anime: a thing I would do was go on the internet and search the shows I watched in the hopes of finding more content, which was how I came upon the world of fanfics and fanart. I remember how I’d look for & read FMA fanfics nonstop. RWBY was no exception; thus, I was introduced to Bumbleby through the fan-made works of its supporters (same for White Rose, which is also my favorite but a guilty pleasure because I think it’s much less likely to be canon). At first I was confused by such work, thinking ‘why would anybody ship Blake and Yang together if Blake had Sun?’ It didn’t make sense to me at first, but I found myself drawn to the numerous depictions of Blake & Yang together nonetheless.

And then it hit me: they look good together. GREAT, in fact. I was stunned, never having thought that such a relationship could have ever been conceived before. It was as if nothing could compare, nor the other RWBY ships could stand up to it. Not even Arkos, probably one of if not the most significant ship in RWBY, was designed so perfectly like Bumbleby was. Just everything about those two complimented & contrasted with each other so well – black against yellow, amber eyes complementary to lilac ones, and their fantasy inspirations intermingling with one another. The more I would find fanart and fanfics of it, the more I would fall in love with it. It was by far the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, and it was the works of other fans that convinced me that they were the perfect ship.

But to me at first, it didn’t look like Rooster Teeth agreed with that train of thought. I still believed that they were gonna put everyone in a straight romance (and by that I mean I still thought Blake and Sun were gonna hook up). I didn’t really have any of the investigative skills I have now to look deeper into the show to think otherwise, though I did question moments in the show that wouldn’t have made sense for a friendship-Bumbleby or a romantic-Black Sun. Still, I was certain that Blake & Yang were straight at first, so I pretty much made Bumbleby a guilty pleasure. Honestly, I would’ve still supported Rooster Teeth and RWBY if they went with Black Sun, as I didn’t fall for the series simply for the romance.

Then Volume 4 came out, then Volume 5, and now Volume 6. Now, I have come to new conclusions: RWBY has a bigger n’ better bad in the form of Salem, Adam is the bull-horned bastard that he is who deserved damnation, and everything is a lot more greyer than previously thought (as in not morally black and white). Oh, and I concluded something else that’s really important: not everybody is straight. Black Sun turned out to be a friendship more so than a romance; Yang and Blake were painfully missing each other during their separation; then they were reunited and that’s all that matters (music reference haha); everything just started pointing towards a deeper relationship between the ex-partners. Bumbleby was more than likely to be canon, and it pretty much is at this point. Their stories were practically woven together, setting everything up for them to be together. Everything about Bumbleby just seemed right now. I couldn’t have been more elated.

So some individuals outside the Bumbleby fandom may think that I’m “delusional” for believing in its confirmation. Some of those people may think I’m approving of something “toxic” (which is a ridiculous sentiment might I add). Frankly, I don’t care for any negative things others might say about my preferences. This is the internet, only real life can hurt my feelings. It also never matters to me if the characters in a canon or non-canon ship are of the same gender & sexuality or not, what matters is that they’re depicted to be happy and in love. I ship two characters I adore because it makes me happy. Frankly, I’m always afraid of never finding a special someone. The thought of not having a partner and living alone severely depresses me, and I have these thoughts constantly. But when I see two amazing characters I appeal to in a happy, healthy, and fantastically developed relationship, especially one like Bumbleby, it will always give me a little hope for my own future. Or if a ship’s simply canon then I’ll just love it like a blind puppy dog.

So I guess that’s all I have to say. I enjoy the Bees, they’re on their way to canonization if not already, and I couldn’t be happier. I also couldn’t be more thankful for the contributions of others in the RWBY fandom to Bumbleby. If I didn’t find the passion behind Bumbleby that others have, a passion I learned to share & understand, I’d probably be a generally more miserable person than a joyful one. Thank you for taking your time to read this earnest discussion. If anyone wants to see more of these from me, please be sure to let me know. Also, send me any asks if you want me to elaborate on anything!

#rwby #bumbleby #yang xiao long #blake belladonna #long post #earnest discussion

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hagiographically · 8 years ago

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Could you talk more about Stanford stereotypes regarding literally anything (idk majors?) bc they way how you explain them is literally so funny/good

lmao aw ily, you can always come to me if u want my opinion related to anything stanford (stereotypes about dorms, sports teams, greek life, a cappella ??) because i have A Lot Of It - i only wish i was more integrated with the school cuz most of my opinions are hearsay instead of personal experience

major stereotypes….hmm thats hard cuz there are So Many majors but i can just go with the most common ones and group some together, etc

engineering:

aero/astro - small department full of space nerds, most of them are in SSI, drones, i personally consider them very brainy and if i were better at engineering i would be aero/astro cuz i think it’s the next frontier. there should definitely be more women in it for sure

bioe - my ex was bioe, they’re a bunch of nerds but they have good enough hearts. they care about curing diseases and shit

CS - oh boy. ohhhhhh boy. here we fuckin go. honestly CS is barely even a sterotype at stanford cuz its such a dominant culture…..the people who decide what stereotypes even are, are probably CS. it’s gotten to the point where if i meet someone and they aren’t CS it’s worth noting. it’s gotten to the point where, in my psych/literature/communications/education classes, i expect the other people to be CS. i have so many Opinions on CS Boys because CS Boys are such!!!!a!!!type!!!! (and different from just, a boy who does CS). they worship the trinity of google, facebook, and microsoft. their junior summer internship is at least one of these. they buy into all silicon valley startup culture and they love elon musk and talk about venture capital when its really not welcome. they love talking about how much work they have and how little they sleep. all INTJs. probably virgos. there is also a subgenre of CS boy who didnt come into stanford wanting to do CS and ended up switching because its easier to be a CS Boy at stanford. they criticize the culture all the time. to this you can say, “it’s all right, craig, i know you just want to make money.”

CME - people major in this when they dont love themselves

design - i personally think this major is fuckin cool and considered it before i realized physics was a pre-req. the d school is thought to be d for douchey though because their whole shtick is so ~ideate~ ~prototype~ ~We Are Quirky and Put Post-Its On Walls~ but i dug it as a frosh. they can be kinda condescending, but theyre by far the most interdisciplinary dept in the engineering major (although its also full of white men who think theyre hot shit cuz they can use photoshop)

EE - again for people who lack self love, its supposed to be so fuckin hard

MS&E - white frat boys who glorify jordan belfort

ME - similar to design. live at the PRL. stay up till ungodly hours carving wood. somehow this is enjoyable. also white male heavy

who knows how the f to categorize this:

education - if i could do stanford over i would major in this. usually very diverse, woke, often come from underprivileged backgrounds so they want to make it better for other people and reach communities that arent currently benefited (unlike silicon valley or wall street :) ) i respect them because they do what they love and not to make $ although if educational engineering were a thing im certain people would jump ship. it’s also not in the humanities dept so i feel like theyre Above the stanford hegemony and i love that

earthsys - i considered a minor in this. usually sweet, earth-friendly people. white but woke. possibly queer. granola loving hippies and maybe some frathletes who want an “easy” major but not sure (im not shitting on easy majors. i have one. love ‘em)

generally i like girls in any of the engineering depts because they are dealing with sexism and doing it. the boys are oftentimes extremely self-congratulatory and will usually say something dumb about the humanities. even the girls will hit you with the “oh i wish i could study that!” about any non-engineering discipline, and it’s implied that what they’re really saying is “but i care about my future too much!”

humanities/sciences:

AAAS/chicanx studies/asian-american studies/CSRE - woke poc who use lots of buzzwords and say things like folx

art - the people who major in art are usually more quiet than you’d think. we have an Artsy Type at stanf that are kind of extra (theta chi/EBF types, also very woke QPOC) but i dont think theyre art majors for the most part. i barely know any actual art Majors. lots of engineers just do art on the side

bio - i love bio majors because they are sciency but also get shit on by engineers so we’re in solidarity. they are sweet and study all the time and just wanna make the world a better place. there’s also the pre-med kind of bio who i would hate if i were also pre med but since im not i just kind of admire and fear them

chem - i like chem people much more than i thought i would. again a very small major and they just live in lab and have varied non chem interests. this year i accidentally became friends with like 6 people from the chem fraternity and i was surprised how much i liked them

complit/english - i was this major! english in creative writing are usually chill, interesting people. complit and english in literature…….it’s a shakespeare circlejerk and they hit you with the Discourse. overly educated white people. avoid the boys specifically but the girls can also be incredibly self-satisfied. maybe 50/50. but if you take a creative writing class instead of a lit class, the CW kids are usually awesome

taps - our drama department. they’re nice, but extra and intimidating. (also stanford theater is…..okay….not really as good as they seem to think it is yikes that was mean but) however, like with english, take an introductory class and you’ll meet very cool non-taps majors.

econ - oftentimes wonderful people! outside of class that is

femgen - same people as the AAAS/CSRE crowd except whiter. queer girls with undercuts. upperclassmen are intimidating to many. everyone shares their opinion even when its not warranted. my honors is in this

film studies - this was almost my minor and if i werent CW i might have doubled in film and comm! i dont know any film majors but if they arent a cole sprouse im sure theyre fine (they are probably a cole sprouse)

german/italian/french/spanish language or studies - spot the person who studied abroad!

history - like english, can be cool, more likely pretentious

humbio - the other premeds! actually humbio gets shit on alllll the time for being easy or having a fluff major, bio majors think they’re soft. thus, i like them. their course catalog is awesome and its a huge major but all the scary pre meds are straight up bio and humbios are softer but in a good way its a lot of sweet girls

intl relations - one of my favorite majors. usually very down to earth, the best of the IR/poli-sci/pub-po trinity. however, they can also be self-congratulatory for being So Woke and also they love to educate you when You Didn’t Ask

linguistics - weird, diverse people. very small major. similar to anthro, my old major. i love small majors they always have cute dinners together

MCS - a hard fuckin major. not as “Look How Smart I Am” as a bad CS. mostly quiet and stay in and study their ass off

math - love to wax poetic about the beauty of math. fun when drunk. not when sober

philosophy/MTL/classics - avoid. classics can be okay if it overlaps with archaeology because theyre just a bunch of nerds and they get really excited and its cute. phil majors would rather just educate you about how free will is fake and youre like tim can you please just get out of the way we’re in the dining hall and you’re blocking the cornbread

physics - Avoid. they think all other sciences are lesser. women and POC are ok

poli-sci - hit or miss. generally pretty friendly. very talkative. fun to talk to about Not Politics

psych - the best major hehe. generally liberal and woke and often queer. however, non-psych people in psych classes can be a nightmare (unlike english, taps, etc) and problematic as fuck. also sometimes psych majors are extra (exhibit a: me)

pub policy - probably in student government. im biased against it, but go in with hesitation. student government is by and large not as effective as they seem to think (however, a “woke” person in pub po might be cool because they will campaign for sexual assault awareness and economic diversity and good stuff)

STS - ohhhhh man. probably the major that gets most shit on at stanford. i think engineers think it’s fake. (humbio, design, and STS get shit on the most i’d say, because they are interdisciplinary STEM majors, so engineers think that they’re for people who arent smart enough to do hard majors. whereas with english or IR, engineers know they couldnt do it because they havent written an essay since 2009, so they offer grudging respect) a frathlete major. i personally like it because i dig interdisciplinary shit, but i don’t dig frat boys or athletes so i avoid. some of their courses are great but it does seem kind of scrapped together as a major and i dont know how people outside of stan see it

sociology - a small major, seems cool. stigmatized but not by stanford because stanford students dont know it exists. “dont you mean psychology?” no

urban studies - skaters? who knows. i respect them tho. i think they care about….like….architecture? and city development? its a very niche thing and i feel like it’s pretty hip n happening

#stanford #stanford university #majors #college #advice #stereotypes #stan

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topsolarpanels · 7 years ago

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Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to find why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humen moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is met up in simply the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, virtually four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that aimed its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I insured there were specialists who have, over the course of nearly 10 years on this mission, mastered the arts and science of polar data hunting while, at the same day, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa technologists sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were assuring, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally money climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag explained to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can produce unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the last decade of his life( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight weather meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight hour. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers money, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the climate the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats required is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had made the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate meeting, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blob dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I fulfilled Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What stimulates this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I honestly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his exuberances and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What attains it real ? I mean, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, directly on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US situateds the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter probably had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what builds that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen repository of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto track Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by technologists sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and valleys, and also a clear opinion of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The path of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish glee( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for instance, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing corpuscles of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what builds this real for him. Behind even well-meaning topics is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has stimulated it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate arrangement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related funds from the federal budget this year. When the White House recently proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budgetary support deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US built Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still maintain a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly kept armed atomic weapon. In one of naval history more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, generated a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland gives the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice tunnels nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed quickly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial airplane at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our pouches still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the bags hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually merely one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the route, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles airplane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astound and hugs, because the last time they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my container, I stimulated my way down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was remain. But before I met the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant aroma of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and fragrance it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is determining cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes voiced as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is astonishingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark humour, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was staring at a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, courtesy of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several each member of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, honestly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the government shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the governmental forces in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant truly talking here that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in anxiety of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of change workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you assure people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure engineers asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were blithely collecting data. For some stretchings, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This permeating somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the appear of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, devoted the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a being on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that assured by novelists in past centuries, who saw this scenery, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snows a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old narratives discontinued. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar decideds spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, die gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so frightened Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep globes climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more hot is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other routes, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps makes life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling dread in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be seen even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripples of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I considered the same strong hand that profoundly etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were made by shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice gave shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulp of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same day that were getting better at assembling this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer joke that it might be easier to merely rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

In another conversation, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would greet a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, assuring the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: merely stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing reply. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, got pedantic, telling me that there existed others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the confidence of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record view expressed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all assured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the taped answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I believed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red record sunlight. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher chuckled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the present US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest question was only met with silence and a few jokes. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talking here trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing answer: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising impact. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling stories. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped drone, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in considering these people who had spend all day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage recently shot at the Thule base. The video indicated some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft rockets. Today its simply an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the day before. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and said: Well anyway, maybe thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and only do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chatter stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, appearing down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to ensure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is gathered up in only the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, nearly four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and quickly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would build the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips barely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this quantity of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for almost a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as climate permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly shifting ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that objective its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launch next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I assured there were specialists who have, over the course of almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same hour, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding airplane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to find what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a climate meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy weather office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its probably why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight day. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight hour is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric condition. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With climate, “were not receiving” is. Whats required is the ability to comprehend constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had stimulated the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the weather session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What builds this real to you? The question had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I frankly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece jacket and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellow ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that question was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What constructs it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gasolines turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US situates the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at its design and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in mind. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa recurs its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish mirth( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what attains this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has made it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media helped them along by interring the narrative under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dogs on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America built a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys most ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland dedicates the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed promptly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere to be found. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our containers still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the pouches hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually simply one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the style, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres merely ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butts. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astonish and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I finally got my purse, I built my style down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was staying. But before I fulfilled the crew, I met the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant odor of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and odor it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any style of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is observing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew talked about their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his telephone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually screamed Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one technologist put it to me, We simply get nervous, frankly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant genuinely talking here that without feeling those emotions again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of the performance of their duties by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of shift workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure technologists asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were merrily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or merely flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic humming of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which gave them the looking of boys in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier extends across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photo: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a most varied opinion from that considered by writers in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by barge or, more likely, from a describe. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of death and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old tales terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar puts spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so terrified Melville and Poe, who aims his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earths climate cool; the loss of all this white material entails more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps induces life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flowing, I ensure the same strong hand that deep etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low hills smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice devoted shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the well-being of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear express of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same period that were getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the humor floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to simply rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do maintenance on that, he pointed out.

In another dialogue, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would welcome a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, considering the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: simply stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already immersed in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing respond. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, functional specialists in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a resulting expert in the field. The off-the-record opinion conveyed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal difference between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher laughed a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest topic was only met with silence and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science session, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont appears to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about persons under the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing reply: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped droning, and had constructed spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they collected around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something are moving forward watching these people who had spend the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now spending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon crept into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video presented some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted concrete bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft weapons. Today its only an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, merely a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the ruinings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because such an approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Perhaps its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets go. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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