[Kathryn Hansen] I can't talk. Hang on. Alright. Ready.
I'm Kathryn Hansen and I'm with the NASA Earth science news team.
[Jefferson Beck] I'm Jefferson Beck, I'm a video producer with the Earth science storytelling team.
[Kathryn Hansen] And we're here in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. We arrived a few days ago and we'll be here for about two weeks, bringing you all the excitement from Ice Bridge.
[Jefferson Beck] This is my first time here in Greenland, I'm very excited to be here. We arrived just a couple days ago right after the sea ice flights concluded, but we've still got lots of land ice flights, flights over glaciers, flying at 1500 feet over these ice features. So sometimes the rocks on either side of you, so I'm told, are way up above your head. So I'm excited to actually get up there on a plane, but as we'll hear, uh ... we don't have a plane at the moment.
[Jefferson Beck] So what have the challenges been for this mission?
[Kyle Krabill] The challenges for this campaign, well, first we left earlier than we ever have. And up in Thule, which is a very cold and remote area, when we first got there, I think our windchills were about -45 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is something to experience when you're outside and I'm having to set up a tripod outside, in blowing wind and your eyelashes are freezing together and my moustache is frozen solid from my breath exhaling. That's a different kind of thing. Also, with the weather, we went through a delta class storm in Thule, which lasted about thirty-six hours, and the wind was blowing over 100 miles per hour in some areas right there at the base, and I saw windchills down to -63 degrees Fahrenheit and we had to we were locked in our dorms and relied on MREs to eat, so weather had been a big challenge.
Now here in Kangerlussuaq, we've had a slight trouble with the mechanics on the airplane. On our first flight out of here yesterday the mechanics noticed it and as they were checking out the plane and now they've had to ferry the plane back to Wallops island at the NASA base there to do some repairs. And they left us scientists here just for safety reasons. So we've had a day off where we can process data and get out in the field.
[Kathryn Hansen] Today in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, we took advantage of our day off from flying, on the ground here, to calibrate our GPS system. We drove around in this truck with a GPS antenna on top for five hours, going no more than ten miles per hour, covering fifty miles And what this does is it creates an elevation map of a known area the ramp, that we use to calibrate the instruments on the aircraft so we can be very confident in our measurements of the ice sheet.
[Jefferson Beck] While Kathryn was safe and warm inside that truck, I was outside trying to get one of the more boring time-lapses that I hope to ever shoot. Aand here's my state of mind and state of being after that hour and a half out in the cold.
[ wind ][snow crunching underfoot]
So I feel like there is some analogy here that could be drawn to science. Short periods of action, short periods of useful data into the camera, and long periods of sub-, sub-freezing temperatures.
So we've been going around shooting all day, interviewing people, that sort of thing; but probably my favorite thing is something that's happened at night. Two nights in a row now, we've had these fantastic auroras out. And we sat out last night, walking out and doing a time-lapse by taking 30 second exposures, one by one by one, for about an hour and a half. And I think it turned out fairly well.
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