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Interviewer: Ok, John, could you give us a sense of how

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this mission was designed, your weather thoughts coming into it, and the

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scenery coming in over the calving front. That sort of thing.

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Sonntag: Ok, sounds good. My name is John Sonntag,

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I'm a senior scientist with the ATM Team – that’s Airborne Topographic Mapper.

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Today’s mission was called the

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Recovery Offshore 01 mission, made up of six parallel lines spaced at 20 kilometers.

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It’s called that because we concentrate on the area where the Recovery glacier,

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which is a major glacier in this part of east Antarctica, drains into the Filchner Ice Shelf.

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It tends to be difficult to get measurements to help us understand the shape

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of the cavity of water, ocean water beneath an ice shelf

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such as the Filchner, especially a big one like the Filchner.

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With our gravity instruments and our radar instruments on board the DC-8

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we are able to collect measurements which allow analysts and scientists to deduce the

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shape of those underwater cavities. And that’s important because it

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by knowing the shape of those cavities, scientists can begin to get at

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the interaction of these glaciers with warm ocean waters.

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Which, it has been determined within the last decade or two by the glaciological community

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that the interaction of these large glaciers and warming ocean waters

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tend to be quite important in determining their future behavior.

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The weather today was probably not what you would call ideal;

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we knew that there would be a cloud layer at about between eight and ten thousand feet,

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And we had a lot of confidence in this particular forecast

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So our transit in this morning took us in over the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula

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and over the extreme southern part of the Weddell, just in front of the Ronne Ice Shelf.

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And sure enough, most of it was clouded as the models predicted it would be.

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We could see bits of sea-ice surface here and there,

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But when we made our descent into the Filchner Ice Shelf area, we could see the edge

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of the ice shelf and the edge of Berkner Island. It was clear skies there,

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and when we got on site, we were very pleased

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to see that the forecast indeed held up.