WEBVTT FILE

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Yesterday’s flight was intended to take us from thdeserts of

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California to the North pole.[So] the mission turned

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out to be quite a challenge. andwe had bad weather in the Arctic and

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it made very difficult for us to do the sampling that we had really intended to do.

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The crew is very resourceful and they were able to take us from the upper

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atmosphere right down to the surface, where we flew around

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and were able to observe melting of the ice. And also to observe the changing

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in atmospheric composition. into the core of The Arctic circulation

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we found the air was really, really, clean

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But outside of there it's been extremely hot and dry in Alaska

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and in Siberia, and there's a lot of fires burning, and you can see the

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output of smoke all the way there, and we also were

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traveling into the den of the heartland of climate change

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So the Arctic is changing very, very quickly.

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We didn't see any multi-year ice. All we saw were very, very flat pieces of ice.

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that were all broken up. The flat pieces of first

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year ice, if we had done this same trip 20 years ago there would have been scads

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of multi-year ice and very little open water. So it was a very successful flight

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and we're looking forward to doing the next one.

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We are here in Hawaii now,

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we're at the James Cook Memorial.

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This is a spot near where James Cook was killed. Now James Cook was the Captain of a British

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ship exploring the world. This is what the ATom mission is doing right now, we are

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flying the NASA DC-8 around the world, jumping from spot to spot

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Yesterday on Wednesday we jumped down from Anchorage Alaska

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down here to Hawaii, and we went past a little Aleutian

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airfield called Cold Bay, and in fact we went down over

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Cold Bay at a couple hundred feet. So all the way down here to Hawaii we're going up and down

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and up and down measuring atmospheric gases so,

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Like James Cook, we're exploring the world. We're exploring the atmosphere

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to find out what might happen in the future from climate

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change. So today we're in this lovely spot. On Saturday, we fly down

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to America Samoa, and then it's on to Christchurch New Zealand from there

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and we continue our world tour.