Yesterday’s flight was intended to take us from thdeserts of
California to the North pole.[So] the mission turned
out to be quite a challenge. andwe had bad weather in the Arctic and
it made very difficult for us to do the sampling that we had really intended to do.
The crew is very resourceful and they were able to take us from the upper
atmosphere right down to the surface, where we flew around
and were able to observe melting of the ice. And also to observe the changing
in atmospheric composition. into the core of The Arctic circulation
we found the air was really, really, clean
But outside of there it's been extremely hot and dry in Alaska
and in Siberia, and there's a lot of fires burning, and you can see the
output of smoke all the way there, and we also were
traveling into the den of the heartland of climate change
So the Arctic is changing very, very quickly.
We didn't see any multi-year ice. All we saw were very, very flat pieces of ice.
that were all broken up. The flat pieces of first
year ice, if we had done this same trip 20 years ago there would have been scads
of multi-year ice and very little open water. So it was a very successful flight
and we're looking forward to doing the next one.
We are here in Hawaii now,
we're at the James Cook Memorial.
This is a spot near where James Cook was killed. Now James Cook was the Captain of a British
ship exploring the world. This is what the ATom mission is doing right now, we are
flying the NASA DC-8 around the world, jumping from spot to spot
Yesterday on Wednesday we jumped down from Anchorage Alaska
down here to Hawaii, and we went past a little Aleutian
airfield called Cold Bay, and in fact we went down over
Cold Bay at a couple hundred feet. So all the way down here to Hawaii we're going up and down
and up and down measuring atmospheric gases so,
Like James Cook, we're exploring the world. We're exploring the atmosphere
to find out what might happen in the future from climate
change. So today we're in this lovely spot. On Saturday, we fly down
to America Samoa, and then it's on to Christchurch New Zealand from there
and we continue our world tour.