Transcripts of OIB_Ant12_Recovery_Offshore_youtube_hq

Interviewer: Ok, John, could you give us a sense of how this mission was designed, your weather thoughts coming into it, and the scenery coming in over the calving front. That sort of thing. Sonntag: Ok, sounds good. My name is John Sonntag, I'm a senior scientist with the ATM Team – that’s Airborne Topographic Mapper. Today’s mission was called the Recovery Offshore 01 mission, made up of six parallel lines spaced at 20 kilometers. It’s called that because we concentrate on the area where the Recovery glacier, which is a major glacier in this part of east Antarctica, drains into the Filchner Ice Shelf. It tends to be difficult to get measurements to help us understand the shape of the cavity of water, ocean water beneath an ice shelf such as the Filchner, especially a big one like the Filchner.  With our gravity instruments and our radar instruments on board the DC-8 we are able to collect measurements which allow analysts and scientists to deduce the shape of those underwater cavities. And that’s important because it by knowing the shape of those cavities, scientists can begin to get at the interaction of these glaciers with warm ocean waters. Which, it has been determined within the last decade or two by the glaciological community that the interaction of these large glaciers and warming ocean waters tend to be quite important in determining their future behavior. The weather today was probably not what you would call ideal; we knew that there would be a cloud layer at about between eight and ten thousand feet, And we had a lot of confidence in this particular forecast So our transit in this morning took us in over the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula and over the extreme southern part of the Weddell, just in front of the Ronne Ice Shelf. And sure enough, most of it was clouded as the models predicted it would be. We could see bits of sea-ice surface here and there, But when we made our descent into the Filchner Ice Shelf area, we could see the edge of the ice shelf and the edge of Berkner Island. It was clear skies there, and when we got on site, we were very pleased to see that the forecast indeed held up. With the low sun angle that you get down in these parts, just a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful scene. So it went very well today.