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[Music]

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John Sonntag: Our flight today takes us from Longyearbyen, Svalbard back to Thule, back west,

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back to one of our main bases of operation after a bit of a

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one-week sojourn over here in Svalbard.

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We started off the mission with some flightlines

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over Svalbard’s ice sheets – small ice sheets – and glaciers.

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Of course that’s not the reason we went

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to Svalbard to begin with. We went there to expand our sea ice coverage

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over on the eastern side of the pole, which is a very exciting science goal

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for the project.But it turns out that in order to get to that sea ice

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you have to fly over large portions of Svalbard itself.

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It gives us a nice long comparison

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of where the glaciers were 15 and 20 years ago versus where they are

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now in terms of volume.

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In addition to the ATM data over these glaciers, we’re also getting some very very modern

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state of the art radar data from the MCoRDS sounder, from the

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accumulation radar which tells us a lot about the snow accumulation

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in the last several years in the top several meters of the

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ice on Svalbard, and also from the snow radar, which is also a

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new instrument.

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We only mapped glaciers in Svalbard today for about 20 minutes. That’s how long it took us to get off into the Fram Strait

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off the northwest corner of the archipelago. And that takes us into some really

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interesting sea ice there. It changes dramatically. The sea ice changes dramatically

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as you cross the Fram from east to west. It starts out with a little bit of open water there

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at the northwest tip of Norway and then you get into some broken up pack ice,

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looks like a big piece of ice that someone took a hammer to,

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and shattered, a giant hammer. Really it’s pretty stuff, neat looking.

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And then it gets more and more consolidated as you go west.

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The Fram Strait by the way is

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the primary pathway that sea ice from the Arctic Basin gets out

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to the warmer oceans of the world.

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After we got to Greenland

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we turned north and made sort of an M-shaped pattern,

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and the purpose of that was to track the gradient of sea ice, the thickest oldest sea ice

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near the coast of Greenland and getting thinner up toward the pole.

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And then we’ll finish out the mission today heading into the Nares Strait,

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going across the ice arch at the top of the strait, it’s an arch of ice

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it’s kind of an interesting, almost a structural looking feature

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on satellite imagery and out the window.

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And then we go back to Thule, spend the weekend,

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rest up after our many time zones of travel this week, we’re all pretty tired,

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rest up over the weekend and then start up again next week.

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[music fades]