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[music]

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[music]

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Narrator: Operation IceBridge if fundamentally about climate research, 

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but it never misses an opporunity to teach. While deployed at the 

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always-windy southernmost tip of Chile, the team hosted

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the US Ambassador, as well as the space agency's chief scientist.

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Ambassador: This is very exciting to be part of this NASA IceBridge mission

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and it shows what good work we do with the State Department and with NASA in promoting science diplomacy.

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in countries like Chile. Narrator: The pair traveled with the research team

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for an actual mission over Antarctica. There they got a first-hand opportunity

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to see how the team does the job. Stofan: IceBridge is vital because

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it's studying our changing Arctic and our changing Antarctic to help understand

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the real true effects of climate change that are happening in these regions.

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Narrator: Climate change presents intellectual challenges. It's tough

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to grasp transformations at the planetary scale when we live our lives

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at the human scale. But global climate is changing. 

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And because it concerns the whole planet, NASA sends teams around the world

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to collect essential data. Operation IceBridge is just such a mission.

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It deploys flying research laboratories like this

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to repeatedly measure changes in polar ice.

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That's what brought the team to Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile. It's the best location

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for staging regular missions over Antarctica.

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It also afforded the US diplomatic mission first-hand experience with something that's

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ultimately beneficial for broader goals.

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So the studies that we're doing on climate change are critical to our mission. 

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Ambassador: Our embassy's very supportive of this. It's part of my job, and part of our jobs as ambassadors

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to promote good relations between countries, and this kind of activity, this kind of mission

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does exactly that. 

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Somewhere in the air above Antarctica, I'm Michael Starobin.

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[beep beep, beep beep]