[music]
Narrator: Operation IceBridge if fundamentally about climate research,
but it never misses an opporunity to teach. While deployed at the
always-windy southernmost tip of Chile, the team hosted
the US Ambassador, as well as the space agency's chief scientist.
Ambassador: This is very exciting to be part of this NASA IceBridge mission
and it shows what good work we do with the State Department and with NASA in promoting science diplomacy.
in countries like Chile. Narrator: The pair traveled with the research team
for an actual mission over Antarctica. There they got a first-hand opportunity
to see how the team does the job. Stofan: IceBridge is vital because
it's studying our changing Arctic and our changing Antarctic to help understand
the real true effects of climate change that are happening in these regions.
Narrator: Climate change presents intellectual challenges. It's tough
to grasp transformations at the planetary scale when we live our lives
at the human scale. But global climate is changing.
And because it concerns the whole planet, NASA sends teams around the world
to collect essential data. Operation IceBridge is just such a mission.
It deploys flying research laboratories like this
to repeatedly measure changes in polar ice.
That's what brought the team to Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile. It's the best location
for staging regular missions over Antarctica.
It also afforded the US diplomatic mission first-hand experience with something that's
ultimately beneficial for broader goals.
So the studies that we're doing on climate change are critical to our mission.
Ambassador: Our embassy's very supportive of this. It's part of my job, and part of our jobs as ambassadors
to promote good relations between countries, and this kind of activity, this kind of mission
does exactly that.
Somewhere in the air above Antarctica, I'm Michael Starobin.
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